The Business of Warplanes 

Most billionaires collect yachts, paintings, or maybe an island. Isaacman collects fighter jets, a whole squadron of them. And not just any jets, but the kind that once squared off in Cold War skies.

“Airworthy, I’ve got a MiG-29, five F-5s, three Alpha Jets, four L-39s, and a Tornado that’s close to being finished,” he tells me, tallying them up out loud as though doing inventory in his garage.

He laughs before landing on the final number: “Fourteen.”

A MiG-29 or Tornado isn’t a weekend toy; they’re machines built for war, normally chained to the world’s most tightly controlled runways. That a New Jersey entrepreneur could one day be strapping into one of their cockpits shows just how far his passion carries him.

In his twenties, after earning his pilot’s license, he gravitated toward vintage aircraft that were relatively accessible on the private market, and they gave him his first taste of owning and flying historic military hardware. From there, his ambitions grew. As he built wealth through Shift4 Payments, he began branching into more advanced jets and eventually fighter jets.

The legal hurdles alone would deter most enthusiasts. Isaacman explains that there are essentially two categories of private warplane ownership.

“For foreign aircraft, you import them through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. It’s relatively straightforward. You basically just disarm the cannon unless you have a DoD contract to use it,” he explains. “But for US-origin aircraft like A-4s, F-5s, or F-16s, it’s much tougher. That process goes through the State Department, with much stricter demilitarization requirements, unless you’re using some of those capabilities specifically to support the Department of Defense.”

Isaacman wasn’t just buying these jets as toys. In 2011, he founded Draken International, a defense company that supplied the Pentagon with adversary aircraft for “Red Air” training — mock adversaries in simulated combat.

“We had about 100 fighter jets at Draken,” he says. “We’d even drop training ordnance, bombs without the explosion, to train JTACs, the guys on the ground who call in airstrikes. We operated on the same training ranges as active-duty forces, places like Fallon [Range Training Complex] or Twentynine Palms [the world’s largest Marine training facility].”

In every training exercise, someone has to play the enemy. Draken’s fleet gave American pilots adversaries to fight against, without having to risk front-line aircraft, freeing up military resources while sharpening the skills of the US Air Force. So it wasn’t combat, but it was combat’s rehearsal stage, with Isaacman, a private citizen, at the controls — as close as a civilian pilot gets without a warzone.

He’s never flown into war, at least not yet. “I’ve never been in combat,” he clarifies. “Airshows, record flights, defense training, yes. But no combat.”

This passion has connected him with some of the greatest fliers in the world. “We bought six ex–Israeli Air Force planes,” he says. “I’ve been to Israel a number of times, since Israel has world-class modernization capabilities for older aircraft, so we would partner with them on a number of things. But I never trained with the IAF, not directly.”

Still, he pays attention to their performance. When I asked for his take on the Israeli Air Force’s record in recent years, particularly its unchallenged air dominance over Tehran during targeted strikes, Isaacman didn’t hesitate.

“Their decapitation strikes were incredibly impressive,” he says, his tone switching from matter-of-fact to awe. “To be operating almost uncontested over Tehran, which has been preparing for this kind of conflict for so long — that was the IAF at its best. Every air force in the word was paying attention to what the IAF was doing.”

The world was treated to a demonstration of how integrated air, ground, cyber, and drone operations could dismantle a foe’s defenses in hours. Isaacman’s respect for that achievement wasn’t just admiration from one pilot to another; it was recognition of a playbook that is changing modern warfare.

Spaceflight: The Ultimate Peak

For Isaacman, the pinnacle isn’t his decade-long hobby of simulating a dogfight in the sky. It’s space.

“Flying in space is the pinnacle of every pilot’s career,” he says. “I was incredibly fortunate to go up twice, and to take part in developmental missions where you’re testing things and breaking new ground. Greatest experience of my life.”

His description of Earth from orbit is both clinical and poetic. “You’re seeing Earth from a vantage point that only about 700 other people have,” he says. “And depending on where you are in your orbit, you see entire continents. You see whole hemispheres, practically, and you realize there are billions of people down there, and there is no one else in the neighborhood — so how kind of precious, unique our environment is.

“And then on the bottom half of the orbit, you get down very low — like 200 kilometers — and you can see cities, and you can see contrails from airliners. It’s also very easy to get an appreciation for how early on our journey is at this point. There are literally trillions of galaxies out there, and we have barely scratched the surface of exploring our solar system. I mean, we went to our closest neighbor, a desolate satellite called the moon, and that is essentially it.

“Up there, it’s very easy to have an appreciation for how small we are in the grand scheme of things. I’m thrilled we’re on this great adventure. We have only just started on it.”

Isaacman agrees with the astronaut who once said that whatever you believed before spaceflight, you believe tenfold after. “If you’re a very religious person, you probably feel even more so after you’ve been to space,” he says. “From my perspective, I’ve always believed that there is far more for us to understand out there, things that we can’t possibly comprehend at this point. Having been to space twice, I believe that even more.”

What Isaacman describes is often called the “overview effect,” a shift in perspective many astronauts report when they see Earth from above. The planet looks fragile and the sense of shared humanity grows overwhelming.

Isaacman’s background and ties to Jewish communities surface in interesting ways. He and his father have supported Chabad of Hunterdon County in New Jersey, even donating “Fighter Pilot for a Day” experiences to Chabad auctions, and Jewish organizations have taken note of his spacefaring role. When Isaacman commanded the Polaris Dawn mission and conducted the first private spacewalk, he was celebrated in Jewish circles as a new name on the list of Jewish astronauts.

His nomination by Donald Trump to head NASA also highlighting the cultural resonance of a Jewish entrepreneur stepping into one of America’s most symbolic science posts. While Isaacman himself doesn’t foreground his Jewishness, his trajectory has prompted speculation on how Jewish law and ritual might one day play out beyond Earth. Questions like Shabbos in orbit, zemanim in space, and Succos on Mars are some aspects of what Jewish identity could mean in a new era of space travel.

Mars, Stars, and Stripes

Elon Musk often talks about putting a million people on Mars by midcentury. Isaacman doesn’t dismiss the dream, but he tempers it with realism. Colonies in bubbles and domes, he says, can’t compare with Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and ecosystems. Mars, in his eyes, is less of a second home and more of a waystation.

“Landing humans and returning them safely from Mars in our lifetime is very realistic,” he says. “Mars colonization is an absolutely extraordinary goal, and one that, when we achieve it, will provide numerous capabilities that are essential for branching out and reaching even farther within our solar system to continue the adventure of exploration and discovery.”

Still, he’s not convinced that multi-planetary life and eventually splitting the human species between Earth and Mars is a realistic goal.

“There’s no better home for us than Earth right now,” he says. “On Mars, for the longest time, you’re going to be living in a bubble. No matter how hard you work, it’s not going to be a good quality of life. But it’s a stepping stone. I would describe it more as an outpost. It’s kind of one stop along the great, vast frontier that is space.”

Still, he sees immense value in the effort. First, because private wealth, not a governmental budget, is driving it.

“The actual cost versus the benefit is incredibly favorable, because it’s largely privately funded — in contrast to the 1960s, when you had 4.5 percent of the federal budget going into the Apollo program. That was also an extraordinary accomplishment, but everybody was paying for it,” he reflects. “Right now some of the richest people in the world are saying, ‘There’s no better use of my resources than giving humankind the capability to reach a planet other than our own for the first time.’ That’s pretty awesome. And from a cost perspective, it’s not a burden that everyone is bearing.”

Second, Isaacman sees value in a hedge against the unknown. “It could be any number of things, from a nuclear war to a chemical weapon, a biological weapon, or an asteroid — any one of these could have a catastrophic effect on our civilization. The fact that a couple of incredibly wealthy people, principally Elon, are investing in a capability to have a hedge against a catastrophic event is a great cost-benefit trade. But it is just one step.”

Isaacman concedes that there is no pressing economic imperative for going to Mars now — but he is bullish on the business potential of space.

“Are we going to stumble on a gold rush on Mars? I don’t think so. But asteroid mining is an eventuality,” he says, “and it will happen whether or not we have an outpost on Mars. There are rare minerals potentially worth trillions on some of these asteroids. At some point in time, we’re going to mine asteroids, and we’ll derive real value in excess of what we put into it, which is a space economy.”

Asteroid mining may someday pay off, but Mars itself offers no obvious windfall. Flooding the market with platinum or rare minerals from a single rock could devalue the very prize. The real value of Mars, he argues, lies in what it enables: a permanent human presence farther out in the solar system.

I ask whether he’s worried about the threat of solar flares wiping out satellites or electrical grids as a plausible “unknown.” Isaacman downplays the risk. He points out that humanity has had satellites and electrical grids for “just a sliver of time” out of all of recorded history.

“So we don’t have a lot of data points on what a bad solar cycle could do,” he says. “But I don’t look at it as catastrophic. The earth’s magnetic sphere provides a fair amount of protection, and we’ve already been encountering some pretty intense solar storms this past solar cycle. A lot of the satellites we have up there are getting pummeled with radiation in general, and I’m sure there could be bad days up there, but I don’t think it would rise to the catastrophic level unless something completely unforeseen happens.”

Political Crossfire

In December 2024, President Trump nominated Jared Isaacman to serve as NASA Administrator, pointing to his unique blend of entrepreneurial success and frontline experience in commercial spaceflight. Trump’s choice of Isaacman for NASA was unconventional. Past administrators tended to be career scientists, generals, or seasoned bureaucrats. Isaacman, by contrast, was a billionaire pilot with two private missions under his belt. That alone made his nomination headline-worthy.

Isaacman advanced through the Senate Commerce Committee with bipartisan support, appearing on track for confirmation. But just days before a final Senate vote, the White House abruptly withdrew his nomination, citing concerns that never fully surfaced in public.

The sudden withdrawal only amplified the drama. One week he was poised to lead America’s space agency into its most ambitious decade since Apollo; the next he was out, a casualty of political crosscurrents.

Observers quickly linked the reversal to Isaacman’s perceived closeness with Elon Musk and past political donations, which some saw as out of step with Trump’s “America First” agenda. The episode left Isaacman both elevated as a serious figure in the future of space exploration and marked as collateral damage in the larger political struggle between Trump and Musk.

“I was nominated to lead NASA. Elon has a company SpaceX, with space exploration. The president, in his inauguration speech, spoke about planting the stars and stripes on Mars. He spoke about Mars in his State of the Union address,” Isaacman relates. “And then, when I was going through the Senate confirmation process, there was this impression that Elon and I are old buddies or something. I started my company in a basement in New Jersey and he was a Silicon Valley guy on the West Coast. Our paths really never crossed until Inspiration4 [the first all-civilian orbital spaceflight] in 2020-21. And it was purely about commercial space.

“I have a lot of respect for Elon,” he continues, “but we’re not friends. I’ve never gone out to dinner with him. I’ve never had a drink with him. Polaris Dawn was a pretty good mission, and we did an awful lot with very few dollars, which is something we’re going to need to do across the whole of government. Elon certainly knows my background across two different companies, and a lot of other people also said I would be a good recommendation. But he wasn’t putting his friend into NASA.”

Still, Isaacman does agree that he had gotten unwittingly caught up in the Trump-Musk feud.

“I definitely think I was caught up in that divorce a little bit, but I think I was much farther down on the list than people realize.”

Literal Rocket Science

Starbase, the SpaceX rocket launch complex, sits at the very edge of Texas, near the Gulf Coast town of Brownsville, where the Rio Grande meets the sea. SpaceX founder Elon Musk picked it for its isolation, its access to water for launches, and the lack of red tape. And that’s how a once sleepy stretch of beach became what is now one of the busiest rocket factories on the planet. In the past four years, Isaacman has visited the burgeoning city-of-the-future nearly a dozen times.

“When I first went in 2021, it was kind of a Wild West,” he says. “It was so impactful, it felt like standing on the ground that was going to change everything. They were building rockets out of giant tent structures — it was nothing like the polished mini city that it is today, with the huge factories, restaurants, housing, and everything. Back then, teams of people would come in for short periods of time and rough it out in giant tents and sleep in trailers and Airstreams. Now they have housing, a sushi restaurant, they have a school. They’re making it a community where their best engineers are comfortable moving their families to, and they’re going from being able to build a handful of starships a year to mass producing dozens of them. So it’s been night and day over the last four years.

“There’s a sign that says ‘Gateway to Mars.’ The question is, do you believe it? I do.”

I ask if he believes mankind will ever reach Mars.

“In our lifetime, for sure, we’re going to see American astronauts walking on Mars. And they’ll be able to come home safely, and we’ll owe a large part of it to the investments that were made in Starbase.”

The key to its success, Isaacman insists, is private enterprise.

“I ran a defense company from 2011 to 2020 where I was working with the Lockheeds, the Boeings, the Northrops of the world. Their goal is to milk the most money out of everything. And here you have a company, SpaceX, that says, ‘This is the best place in the country to build the rocket ships of the future, and I’m just going to pay for it. I’m just going to build it out of nowhere and bring in the people and the talent.’ What they’re doing in Starbase has the potential to change so much here on Earth. It’s extraordinary.”

I bring up point-to-point transport, a concept of future travel that would use rockets to move people or cargo between continents at near-orbital speeds. In theory, a passenger could launch from Texas and land in Tokyo in less than 60 minutes.

For Isaacman, point-to-point passenger rockets is not where Starbase’s potential lies: “I’m not overly bullish on point-to-point transport, because you still need good weather, you still need to depend on propulsive landing. It’s still a rocket. It’ll never be as reliable as an airplane that can glide without engines. And once the rocket lands, how do you put it back on a launcher and launch again? I think there’s niche applications for the Department of Defense for cargo, but in terms of Texas to Tokyo in 45 minutes, I don’t think we’re going to see that anytime soon.”

I ask if he is referring to shuttling tanks to distant battlefields in under an hour. He agrees that there are certainly DoD applications for such point-to-point transport using rockets where it’s worth it to make the risky investment. But he points out that even that application comes with challenges.

“During the Iran-Israel conflict, you saw the Israelis blow a lot of rockets out of the sky pretty easily,” he says. “The thing about rockets is, you can’t really hide them. As soon as they ignite, there’s a huge heat boom. And then rockets are like trains, once they’re in the sky, they’re essentially on railroad tracks. Generally speaking, you know exactly where they’re going. So it’s not foolproof. Point-to-point transport is not on my top five of what I’m personally excited about.”

Three Bets That Could Rewire Space

What does excite Isaacman are three transformative impacts:

1. Orbital economy. With Starship’s low cost, orbit becomes scalable, and space entrepreneurs can finally experiment with less risk.

“The single greatest barrier to unlocking the orbital economy has been the cost of putting things in space. Before SpaceX, a launch was a half a billion dollars. With Starship, you’re going to be able to experiment and take chances on explorations that otherwise would’ve been too expensive.

“Rewind the clock. Imagine it’s the 1980s and you’ve got a car phone, like a cell phone that’s so big it has to be built into your car. Could you ever imagine that 30 years later, some of the most valuable companies in the world would be Meta or DoorDash, things that take advantage of mobile technology but were impossible to fathom in the 1980s?

“Right now, we’re still at the stage in space where everything’s a car phone, because it’s just so expensive and it’s so big. But when the cost to access orbit comes down by 99 percent, which Starship is capable of doing, then you get to start experimenting. You have a whole new wave of entrepreneurs and we can’t possibly imagine what the future orbital economy might be.”

2. Deep-space reach. Refueling in orbit and improvements in propulsion technology will allow Starship to push humans and payloads to Mars, Venus, even Neptune, affordably.

“Because Starship is fully reusable and you don’t throw any of it away, it means that when it arrives in orbit, it has almost no fuel, it can’t go anywhere. So they’re going to build tankers that are going to go up and down constantly to fill up refueling depots in space. It might take 15 launches for every one that goes to Mars. Think of it like air-to-air refueling.

“Right now, if Starship gets to Mars, it won’t be able to come home unless it mines propellant from the ice and atmosphere on Mars. Had I been running NASA, I would have pivoted NASA from focusing on building lots of big rockets and instead built nuclear spaceships using nuclear propulsion. One advantage is the farther you get away from the sun, you’re still generating a lot of power, a lot of heat.”

3. Science at scale. Instead of waiting 20 years for one James Webb Telescope, mass-produced Starships could launch telescopes and probes by the dozen, radically accelerating discovery.

“Everybody loves the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, and we love seeing those pictures. But they’re generational programs. They take 15 to 20 years, and they cost up to $15 billion, because they’re all one-offs. What if you took the Starships they’re cranking out on an assembly line, and just put giant telescopes in them — or probes and other sensors — and you just started firing them off in every direction in the solar system? You would be able to increase the rate of science and at far lower cost, because it’s a giant, mass-producible, low-cost space transport vehicle. We don’t have to wait 20 years for every breakthrough.”

The Show Musk Go On

I ask Isaacman if he can shed light on how Elon Musk has the brain space to be able to tackle so many intense projects at the same time.

“You know, I asked him that once. He just goes back to his first principles reasoning — he breaks even the most complicated thing down to its basic components, to things you know to be true, and he reasons up from there. I think that’s part of a decision-making process where you have to make a whole lot more correct decisions than incorrect ones on very little information, because you’re spread across so many endeavors, and there are just only so many hours in the day. So I think it’s the reasoning that he’s refined over many decades of experience as an entrepreneur and a good batting average with decision making.

“Look, it doesn’t hurt that he’s literally surrounded by the best and brightest in the country, right? If you want to change terrestrial transportation, why wouldn’t you work at the Boring Company? Same with sustainable energy and Tesla, or space exploration and SpaceX. The fact that he’s trying to solve some of the greatest engineering problems to make the world a better place attracts great talent that can help him.”

Jared Isaacman is an optimist who believes the impossible is only a matter of engineering, and in an age of cynicism, that belief is quite radical. I consider the paradox of a man who is so grounded yet seems to feel uncomfortable on terra firma, given his penchant for flying, mountain climbing, and space exploration.

He didn’t set out to become a symbol of the new space age, just like it was never on his agenda to get caught in the crossfire between Trump and Musk. But that’s where history placed him: a reluctant poster child for billionaire astronauts, carrying both the thrill of exploration and the weight of political baggage. His message is less about himself and more about what’s possible if private citizens push boundaries once reserved for superpowers.

Where Isaacman goes from here is anyone’s guess. Another spaceflight? A new fleet of jets? Perhaps another nomination that sticks? What’s certain is the fact that he isn’t finished. For him, distance is not a limit but an invitation. Isaacman insists his real mission is making a difference.

If that means turning billion-dollar toys into tools for science, defense, or saving children’s lives, then he’ll happily keep chasing those horizons to the ends of Earth.

Escape at Starbase

Over the past few years, Elon Musk has been turning a sleepy southern Texas town into a space travel hub. Yet from a distance, Starbase doesn’t look like a town at all, but more like a mirage of steel rising out of cactus scrubland and coastal flats.

Will this place of launch pads and prototypes really become the “Gateway to Mars,” as Musk hopes, as he races to be the first to pitch the flag on the red planet?

If you want to colonize Mars, it seems like the first step is laying claim to a Texas sandbar on the Gulf of Mexico. That’s how Boca Chica, an obscure retirement village whose chief export was the noise of a lawnmower, ended up in witness protection under a new name: Starbase — Elon Musk’s space travel city of the future. The rockets moved in, the retirees moved out and suddenly the only thing quieter than the past are the sea turtles trying to nap between launches.

The town was initially built in the 1960s, a small community of about 30 ranch-style homes, but just a few years in, was devastated by a hurricane and never really regained its footing. In 2000, the population was just 26 people, and by 2006, the population was down to just six, a veritable ghost town.

But that was just fine for Elon Musk — perfect, actually, for building an industrial complex and rocket launch facility for his SpaceX space technology company. And he had no problem buying out the few remaining locals and renaming the town Starbase. “We’ve got a load of land with nobody around, so if it blows up, it’s cool,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

But Starbase isn’t just Boca Chica’s midlife crisis (or Elon Musk’s, for that matter). It’s Musk’s moonshot at making a beach town the launchpad for humanity’s next chapters. And just to keep things interesting, there’s actually another such town — Rocket City, 700 miles east in Alabama — backed by a president with a taste for evading assassins and an affinity for renaming bodies of water “Gulf of America.”

Back in the 1960s, it was the United States and the Soviet Union dueling it out over who would plant the first flag on the Moon. Fast forward to 2025, and the outlines of a new rivalry are emerging, but this time the competitors are not two superpowers. They’re a former-current president and a billionaire entrepreneur who’d once been his best friend: Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk.

On the windswept Gulf Coast of Texas, Musk has carved out his futuristic launch city as his “Gateway to Mars.” Seven hundred miles east, Trump has staked his claim on Huntsville, Alabama, which he has dubbed Rocket City, as the new headquarters of NASA. He presented Rocket City as the federally anointed hub of American spaceflight, which he framed not only as an economic engine for Alabama, but as proof that America, under his stewardship, will continue to lead the heavens.

Both men speak of Mars with the same mix of grandeur and inevitability. Musk sees it as the insurance policy for civilization, a backup drive for humanity. Trump speaks of it as the next frontier of American greatness, a flag-planting exercise that cements US dominance in the firmaments. Either way, whoever gets there first gets to write the chapter.

When the first human-transporting rocket does lift off for Mars, it will almost certainly leave from one of these two places: Musk’s Starbase or Trump’s Rocket City. What’s striking is how little expectation there is that the two will work together. Their visions are too divergent, their egos too large, their constituencies too different. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Competition, after all, was the engine of the original space race. Without the Cold War, Neil Armstrong wouldn’t have taken that (alleged?) small step in 1969. And without a Trump–Musk rivalry — between a billionaire’s dreamscape and a president’s power play, between the freewheeling chaos of Musk’s stainless-steel experiments and the structured legacy of NASA’s institutional might — America risks ceding the 21st-century race for Mars to China, India, or maybe even Qatar. Two competing American visions — one private, one political — ensure that ambition stays hot, that deadlines don’t slip, and that funding doesn’t evaporate.

Whichever city wins, it won’t just decide from where the first Mars rocket launches. It will decide what kind of future humanity builds when it gets there: Trumpian or Muskesque. The race has already begun, and the launch window won’t wait for either man’s ego to cool.

And so, as the new intra-American space race fuels up, we’ve decided to head out to the one that seems to be in first place. The way things are lining up, someone is going to manage to get a human crew onto Mars, and for the time being, no one has been as loud about it as Musk, and no town looks more like a rehearsal set than Starbase.

IN the days leading up to my trip, I’d buried myself so deep in Starbase lore (launch pads, rocket prototypes, Musk memes) that I somehow forgot to check the most basic data point of all: the weather. Luckily, my Uber driver Juan offers the forecast, unsolicited, while approaching the exit ramp of the Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport.

“It’s gonna be ninety-nine degrees tomorrow,” he says casually, as if announcing the price of avocados at Costco. Apparently, not every part of America got the memo that summer was supposed to be over. The southernmost tip of Texas certainly didn’t. “Is that the temperature before or after the rockets explode?” I ask.

I’d never visited a city of the future, so I really had no way of knowing whether Starbase was a functioning town, a metropolis in the making, or just Boca Chica in a secondhand spacesuit. Starbase might self-identify as the gateway to the stars, but the town of Brownsville is the gateway to Starbase.

Starbase, formerly the sleepy Boca Chica Village, sits about 28 miles east of downtown Brownsville, a modest border town that woke up one morning to find itself at the center of the cosmos. For all its futuristic branding, the Starbase outpost still leans heavily on Brownsville as its supply line. The city provides the airport, hotels and a particular Uber driver with a penchant for weather forecasts — the basic infrastructure that keeps engineers, contractors and rocket-watchers circulating through the region. SpaceX, the spacefaring company that Starbase was built around, has injected millions into the local economy through real estate purchases, jobs and tourism, with Musk himself pledging millions more to Brownsville’s schools and downtown revitalization.

Brownsville, a working-class, largely Hispanic Texas border city, now finds itself sharing space with a new wave of outsiders: engineers, tech workers and Musk devotees who don’t always blend seamlessly into the local fabric. Politically, officials frame Starbase as a renaissance opportunity, a chance to shed the “forgotten border town” label and rebrand as the “gateway to Mars,” with “Mars starts here” as its new motto. Many locals are proud to see their city on the global map, yet some worry that Brownsville may turn out to be little more than a supporting actor in Musk’s drama.

The partnership comes with trade-offs: Starbase sits next to the Laguna Madre, a rare hypersaline lagoon, and fragile wildlife preserves. Each launch, explosion, and new construction project stirs tensions between economic boosters and conservationists.

So Brownsville finds itself in an odd position as the proud parent, skeptical landlord and occasional clean-up crew for the rockets next door. It’s the kind of partnership where one side provides the launchpads and the other provides the potholes, and together they somehow aim for Mars. Whether history remembers it as a true gateway city or just the nearest gas station on the road to Mars depends on how well these parallel identities learn to live together.

A small bridge morphs downtown Brownsville into Matamoros, Mexico, not unlike the way Starbase straddles Earth and whichever planets are willing to host us. Instead of turning right toward the bridge, Alejandro, my driver for the morning, merges his pickup truck onto the Boca Chica Highway.

He tells me about the fateful night of June 18th: Shortly before midnight, SpaceX staged its most dramatic test of the year when Starship 36 exploded during fueling, producing a fireball that infused the sky with artificial daylight. Musk chalked it up to a ruptured pressure tank, insisting it was unprecedented. Nobody was hurt, but the debris field stretched into Mexico, prompting diplomatic cleanup alongside the literal one. For the faithful, it was just a solitary step backward along their journey to Mars; for the neighbors, it was a regular Tuesday. Though a few months have passed, this incident comes up in every conversation with the locals when asked about Starbase.

“The explosion shook the whole neighborhood awake,” Alejandro tells me. “I checked a neighbor’s security camera and watched how, for a few moments, the night sky looked like it was noon.” No one had any clue what had taken place and before long they returned to bed. “I didn’t find out what that was until following morning,” he says.

“What if it had been a terror attack?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he admits. “It’s a problem.”

We pass a storefront declaring: “Obamacare: Enroll Here,” still flaunting a logo of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, harkening to a time when Elon Musk was considered a welcome guest at Democratic Party functions.

The Boca Chica Highway takes us through Brownsville’s sparse peripheries. We pass a shuttered shack with fading paint that screams to the world: “BOB’S FIREWORKS: Buy one get 5 free.” Far be it from me to be dismissive of a 6-for-the-price-of-one sale, but who is purchasing fireworks when they’ve already got exploding rockets? If Bob’s fireworks raised questions, the next roadside marquee raised a full-blown mystery.

A little further down we encounter an establishment called Mi Casa Furniture, its sign reading, “FURNITURE SALE: EMERGENCY LIQUIDATION.” And I can’t help but wonder what exactly constitutes a furniture emergency in Brownsville. Did the couches unionize and demand hazard pay for sitting this close to exploding rockets? Or is it just retail code for “Buy this sofa before the next hurricane hits”? Whatever the case, Bob’s fireworks might have the sizzle, but Mi Casa clearly has the drama.

Up ahead is Lot-X, where Starbase employees who live in Brownsville can leave their cars and their dignity, if they prefer taking a shuttle over the lunar-cratered road that passes for a two-lane highway.

The highway is practically sinking in potholes, which my driver blames on the constant parade of trucks hauling supplies to and from Starbase. On either side stretch wide, empty fields, broken only by the occasional dirt road or dirtier lagoon. Across the horizon, cranes rise like jagged punctuation marks against the flat Texas sky.

Beyond that, civilization clocks out. A Border Patrol checkpoint greets you on the return trip only, apparently designed for the kind of person who is resourceful enough to swim across the Gulf of America but hasn’t figured out how to avoid a roadside kiosk by sauntering through the endless open fields on either side. Signage lines the road, bragging about vast tracts of empty land for sale. Too bad I’d already spent my last dollar on discount fireworks.

Stepping out of the vehicle in middle of a particularly empty stretch, I find myself in what feels like a surreal roadside museum featuring three giant exhibits, curated by the algorithm itself. Before me looms a 12-foot metallic-looking bust of Elon Musk (I’m told it’s rubber), its neck draped in an American flag bandana, staring skyward as if waiting for clearance to launch. Flanking it on its left are two triangular meme structures, each 21 feet tall, angular and absurd, monuments to some of the Internet’s more niche communities. These structures are built from cinderblocks and seem to serve no other purpose than providing a sturdy support for the artwork.

The scene is made stranger still by its supporting cast: three weathered RVs and two tractors grinding around piles of gravel, the only signs of human habitation in an otherwise empty expanse of scrub and sky. After a quick selfie, I part ways with this Temu version of Mount Rushmore in pursuit of whatever memes lie up ahead.

Like memes, it’s hard to know what’s true and what isn’t. The Internet recently erupted when Elon Musk declared that his “primary residence” was nothing more than a three-bedroom bungalow at Starbase, valued at just $45,000 (one of those bedrooms, he noted proudly, is a converted garage). But according to Jen, a Brownsville local who’s made plenty of trips out here to Starbase, the reality is a little less humble. Musk’s actual home, she claims, is a sprawling multi-million-dollar ranch just ten minutes away. I decide to check it out. The property is ringed by a slatted fence that only half conceals what’s inside, with a lone police SUV parked in the driveway, pointed toward the highway, discouraging curious passersby from getting too close.

How does Jen know this is his place? She shrugs: “It’s one of those things the people in this neighborhood just know.” For added mystery, Google Maps labels the spot as the “Starbase Mission Control Center.” Out here, myth travels faster than rockets, and the truth is always half hidden behind a slatted fence.

About 3.7 miles from Starbase sits a property with a name that sounds like it was pulled straight from Musk’s Twitter feed: Raptor Roost, on Mars-a-Lago Avenue (though the official address is listed at the nearby Rio Grande Drive). It belongs to Keith Reynolds, a holdout who bought the estate before SpaceX started swallowing up what was left of the neighborhood. While the residents of Boca Chica Village were eventually muscled into selling, Reynolds has managed to keep his patch of ground and is the last remaining inhabitant from the pre-Starbase era.

He admits space travel wasn’t exactly his hobby back then. “I couldn’t have cared less,” he says. “But my love for rockets now is newfound, and it’s all because of Elon Musk and SpaceX.” It helps that resistance wasn’t much of an option. “If I didn’t embrace it, this would be a terrible place to live,” he says. The other residents didn’t do too badly, though, having been bought out with payouts three times the worth of their properties.

For Reynolds, the magic lies in the unpredictability.

“Each launch is unique” he says. “There’s always something new.” Sometimes it’s a booster catching itself on landing, other times it’s where the Starship is headed next. And sometimes, it’s an explosion. During the fiery mishap in June, Reynolds was inside when he heard the rumble.

“I knew that wasn’t a static fire. I knew it was an explosion. It lit up the sky like midday and burned for about an hour,” he recalls. “But I never felt in danger.”

What about his new neighbors, the SpaceX employees? Reynolds says they’re polite but tight-lipped. “It’s really a strange situation,” he explains. “They don’t talk a whole lot, and I think it’s because of the nondisclosure agreements they sign. They don’t want to say something they’re not supposed to.”

I can corroborate that. The Starbase employees I’d encounter weren’t the talkative type either.

Reynolds chuckles when I ask if he gets along with them: “They’re Texans in training,” he says.

He’s become a fan not only of Musk but also of Trump. A few months back, he put up an amusing street sign near his property: “Mars-a-Lago.”

“It was a buddy’s idea, and I just had it made around six months ago,” he says. Visitors can’t resist pulling over for photos, and Reynolds admits that’s half the fun. “The best reaction is people stopping out there and taking their picture with it.”

His property has also turned into a community hub. Since the highway gets sealed off for miles ahead of each launch, Raptor Roost is about the closest vantage point anyone can get to the action. Reynolds hosts family-friendly launch parties where alcohol is banned. As many as 190 visitors (children half-price!) pack his property to watch history streak across the South Texas sky.

“If I’m going to lose my privacy,” Reynolds shrugs, “this is a great way to lose it.”

When I first reached out to Reynolds, I had visions of soaring over Starbase in a chopper, seeing the launchpads and towers from above. In the past, this was a service he’d offer for $200 per person. He quickly deflated that dream. FAA “temporary” flight restrictions (he smirks at the word) have effectively made the ban permanent. “I’m in the Starbase city limits, so no helicopters are allowed here anymore,” he says. Reynolds, ever pragmatic, has moved on. There are rockets, after all, and plenty of them. Besides, it’s the rockets we’re all after, not helicopters.

And so, Keith Reynolds remains the last man of old Boca Chica, lawn chair firmly planted at ground zero for a full view of humanity’s next giant leap.

Approaching Starbase from a distance, it doesn’t look like a town at all, but rather like a mirage of steel rising out of cactus scrubland and coastal flats — until suddenly, two enormous black towers stab upward like twin filing cabinets left behind by giants.

To their right, skeletal launch towers climb even higher, cranes dangling from their tops like oversized marionette strings. The white industrial buildings clustered at their base resemble a factory complex that somehow wandered too close to the Gulf. From miles away, all you hear is wind and the occasional truck. Could this become a bustling metropolis in the not-too-distant future?

A little closer, from the highway, the massive white factory buildings sprawl across the roadside, their boxy shapes more warehouse than wonder. Rolling up to Starbase, the first unmistakable sight is the long black wall stamped with giant white letters spelling out S T A R B A S E.

If Starbase has a skyline, it isn’t made of glass towers or beachfront condos. It’s made of steel barns the size of skyscrapers. Meet the bays: Mega Bay 1, Mega Bay 2, and their not-yet-finished sibling, Giga Bay. Together, they’re the rocket garages of the future, vital for assembling, stacking, and preparing Starship rockets, the backbone of Musk’s Mars program.

Mega Bay 1 is the elder workhorse. This is where the 230-foot stainless-steel super heavy boosters get stacked, outfitted, and stuffed with engines. Inside, cranes swing around like clock hands in overdrive as rocket rings are welded together while engineers walk around looking like Lego figures in white hard hats.

Next door, Mega Bay 2 is more of a Starship boutique, where parts can roll straight from fabrication into final assembly. Here, the upper stages come together, engines get bolted on, payload bays are checked, and the entire stainless-steel spaceship is readied for its rendezvous with the launch pad.

And then there’s the one still growing on the horizon: Giga Bay. The name alone tells you what it wants to be when it grows up: bigger, heavier, and capable of churning out more ships at once than either of the Mega Bays can handle. When finished, Giga Bay will rise nearly 400 feet tall and swallow up about 815,000 square feet of floor space. The cranes inside will be able to lift hundreds of tons like they’re doing a grocery run. In theory, it’s the building that will finally let Musk make good on his promise to roll a new Starship off the line every day (his goal is 1,000 a year across various giga factories), some projected to be taller than the Statue of Liberty dancing on the head of the Great Sphinx of Giza.

These components are all part of Starfactory, a large-scale manufacturing building within Starbase that houses the infrastructure to mass-produce Starship rocket components and vehicles. The idea is that Starfactory makes the pieces, MB1 and MB2 turn them into actual rockets, and someday Giga Bay will turn production into an assembly line on Martian time. Until then, they remain one of the oddest skylines in America.

Along the farthest end of Starbase is the “Rocket Garden,” although the word “garden” feels a little generous as there’s no landscaping here, unless you count patches of weeds clinging for dear life between the concrete slabs. Instead, what greets you is a lineup of gleaming stainless-steel giants, each one with its story.

One is a prototype of Starship, a reusable rocket that climbed some 41,000 feet before plopping back down, proving that Musk’s crazy idea might actually work. There’s a booster that never flew, but stood long enough to teach SpaceX how to weld the next one better. Some are scarred, some pristine, while the vibe is halfway between cemetery and showroom. NASA’s Kennedy Space Center has a Rocket Garden, too, polished and manicured with plaques explaining who did what and when. At Starbase, the lesson plan is simpler: Here are the carcasses of what didn’t work, and here are the monuments to trying again tomorrow.

The original Boca Chica Village stood nearly abandoned by the 2000s, a place where time had stopped but hurricanes hadn’t. Locals used to describe it as the kind of place you’d drive through without realizing you’d been there. But one day Musk arrived, and suddenly the forgotten edge of Texas was on the front page of the future. He started buying properties under shell names, and by the late 2010s had turned the place into a test site for stainless-steel science projects.

The first Starhopper test flights in 2019 made it clear that something new was brewing. By 2021, Musk was tweeting “rename it Starbase,” and earlier this year, locals voted (212–6, yay democracy!) to officially make it a city. But what really makes it a city are the trailer parks and townhouses. More than 300 of them, with many more being built.

Gleaming rows of Airstream trailers sit lined up like dominoes, giving off serious retro-future vibes, as if the 1970s got together and said, “So this is what the future must look like.” Scattered in between are modular townhouses, prefab worker dorms, the odd executive cottage, and it’s safe to assume there are some people living in their Tesla cybertrucks.

“You can’t beat the commute,” one engineer tells me while crossing over from the trailer park in the direction of the SpaceX office building.

The city comes with its own offbeat ecosystem: employee gyms, dog parks, solar farms, and the kind of cafeterias and bars where engineers can argue over thrust-to-weight ratios while holding a pint. Beyond the city limits is an elementary school, just in time for the new year.

Take a right off the centrally-located San Martin Blvd and you’ll find yourself on Memes Street. Once upon a time it was Weems Street, but somewhere along the line, the decision was made that memes were the true lingua franca of the future. A vote was held and democracy won. Then again, this is a place where catching returning rockets with giant robotic-arm chopsticks is considered a reasonable engineering plan, so a Memes Street checks out.

Between the prefab neighborhoods of Starbase proper and the looming launch towers by the beach, the road runs past something most drivers never notice: a scatter of stunted wooden posts jutting out of the tidal flats. These are the Palmetto Pilings, the weather-beaten remnants of a bridge first laid down in the 1840s. General Zachary Taylor marched his troops across this floating bridge during the Mexican-American War, turning this lonely stretch into a military crossing of consequence. A decade and a half later, the bridge was repurposed as a railroad link during the Civil War, ferrying supplies across the coastal wetlands.

Now, the pilings are little more than splinters poking above the waterline. Once, the frontier meant cavalry and cannon wheels rattling across wooden planks; later, it was iron rails and steam locomotives; today, it’s stainless-steel rockets. The contrast is almost poetic: the wooden stubs of a forgotten bridge looking up at the steel skeleton of humanity’s next launchpad.

Somewhere along the roadside, I encounter a more recent relic: Starhopper. Originally dismissed by skeptics as little more than a giant water tank, this squat, stainless-steel prototype astonished the world in 2019 when SpaceX launched it 500 feet into the Texas sky and then landed it safely. It’s the Wright Brothers flyer of Starbase, the improbable contraption that proved the dream might just be possible. Starhopper enjoys legendary status, which is why it’s not merely another exhibit in the Rocket Garden. Standing before it, I can’t help marveling at the audacity. Someone thought it possible to launch something so cumbersome and heavy into the air, persuaded a team of engineers to go through with it, and they actually pulled it off.

And then there are the launch towers, rising like skeletal minarets at the far end of the highway. Mechazilla, which is what Musk decided to name the first tower, is a latticework skyscraper equipped with robotic arms meant to catch returning boosters in midair. Nearby, its sibling stands upright and austere, both structures framed by cranes, pipes, and cryogenic tanks that store and transport gasses in their liquified state. Plumbing snakes overhead, while fuel trucks idle in long rows between security vehicles.

Eventually the highway dead-ends into the Gulf, where I wander onto the beach and bump into the only other civilians for miles, a couple from Oklahoma walking their shih tzu pet dog. They’d come down to the Texas coast to collect seashells to bring back to their landlocked state, and instead found themselves staring slack-jawed at the orbital launch towers rising in the background.

“We’d heard about this Starbase thing,” they tell me, “but we had no idea it was here.”

From the warehouses at the front gates to the twin orbital launch towers planted in the sand at the shoreline, the developed parts of Starbase stretch 2.9 miles end to end. A frontier town perpetually rebuilding itself, cranes sway like metronomes keeping time with Musk’s Mars ambitions. To walk through it is to move from scrubland to skyline, from potholes to prototypes, from Starhopper’s improbable hop to Mechazilla’s improbable promise. It’s less like a finished city and more like a sketch of tomorrow penciled onto the Texas coast.

Starbase is equal parts scrapyard and spaceport, a city of tomorrow built on yesterday’s cracked sidewalks. The roadside still sells discount fireworks and emergency furniture, but just beyond the empty fields and Musk’s lone bust, rockets rise taller than anything else for a hundred miles.

Here, at the very tip of Texas, the land tells its story in layers of modern history still in the making. The rusting shells of old prototypes aren’t exactly archaeological finds, but tell their own story, as do the stainless towers of rockets not yet flown and factories uncompleted. Starbase may be unfinished, improvised, even improbable, yet it stands as humanity’s latest attempt to build a bridge from one world into the next.

While you can’t see Starbase from space (yet), there’s no better place to view space than Starbase. Unless Rocket City, Alabama, proves that the hometown of the Apollo space program still has a few rockets left in its tank.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1081)