When he lost a race for the U.S. Congress in Tennessee, Davy Crockett famously declared, “You all can go the hell; I’m going to Texas.” The rest, as they say, is history.
Almost 190 years since Crockett won deathless glory at the Alamo, a lot of people and companies seem to be sharing his sentiment, especially those residing in California. Hewlett Packard and Oracle are scheduled to move their headquarters from high-tax, high-regulation California to business-friendly Texas. Now, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX fame seems to be the latest to shake his fist, metaphorically speaking, at California and to move to Texas.
Musk’s reasons for becoming a Texan are not hard to understand. If he were to become a Texas resident, he would be able to keep more of his money. California has a confiscatory state income tax. Texas has no income tax.
Even before Musk told his friends that he was moving to Texas, he made his mark on the Lone Star State. SpaceX has been testing rockets in McGregor for years. More recently, the launch company has been developing a giant reusable rocket called the Starship in Boca Chica, a formerly sleepy community near Brownsville. Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company, is building a manufacturing plant near Austin.
Texas and California are often considered political polar opposites. California is dominated by the Democratic Party while Texas is still, as the last election proved, a Republican state. California approaches public policy from a governmentcentric perspective, imposing high taxes and burdensome regulations on residents and companies in the state. Texas has a more businesscentric view. The state even offers tax breaks to companies that promise to move to Texas. Musk has been a beneficiary of that policy.
Texas has always been a state where people who dream big are allowed to pursue those dreams with minimal interference. The state is a center of the oil and gas industry but also, curiously, wind power. West and North Texas are dotted with wind farms that provide electricity to large cities in the east.
Texas and space have been indelibly linked for decades. NASA built its Manned Spaceflight Center south of Houston. Some of the first words spoken on the surface of the moon were, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The eagle has landed.”
The advent of commercial space enterprises to Texas has been a recent development. Musk’s commercial space rival, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Blue Origin fame, has been testing his New Shepard rockets near Van Horn in West Texas for years. In the fullness of time, Bezos plans to take paying customers on suborbital joy rides.
However, Musk’s SpaceX is showing the most promise to transform Texas into a space state. The Starship, a tall, gleaming, stainless steel tower, is designed to take 100 tons of cargo and people to the moon, Mars, and beyond. It would be launched by an even bigger rocket, the Super Heavy. Both, like the first stage of the Falcon 9, would be reusable, landing near the launch site.
NASA is interested enough in the Starship to contract SpaceX to build a lunar lander version of it for the Artemis back to the moon program. Musk dreams of building a fleet of Starships to move people and cargo to Mars to build a settlement on the red planet.
Anyone who thinks that Musk’s dreams of expanding human civilization to Mars are crazy might want to reflect on the salient fact that what the SpaceX CEO has set out to do, he has had a tendency to accomplish. The Falcon 9 first-stage regularly lands after every launch and is reused, greatly reducing the cost of space travel. The Falcon Heavy is the mightiest rocket built since the Saturn V, done almost entirely with private funds. The Starship/Super Heavy may seem like something out of science fiction, but as anyone who has lived long enough knows, science fiction has a way of becoming science fact with time, effort, and imagination.
So, welcome to Texas, Musk. You will surely write a glorious chapter in the Lone Star State’s storied history.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration titled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond.” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
