Starbase

Starbase is two things at one address in South Texas. It is SpaceX's main rocket factory and launch complex at Boca Chica, near Brownsville, and it is the small city that residents voted into existence around that complex in May 2025. SpaceX began buying the land in 2012 and confirmed the site in August 2014, and that scrubland now holds the company's headquarters, the factory for the largest rocket ever built, and a town with its own mayor.

What is Starbase?

Starbase is SpaceX's main site for building and flying Starship, the fully reusable super heavy-lift vehicle meant to carry crew and cargo to the Moon and Mars. A super heavy-lift vehicle is a rocket big enough to haul enormous loads, and this one is designed to fly, come home, and fly again. Starbase is also the name of the small city that surrounds the facility, a general-law town run by a mayor and two commissioners that covers about 1.5 square miles.

Why Starbase Exists

The first reason was control. Government launch ranges are shared, scheduled, and hemmed in by rules, but a program testing experimental hardware at a fast pace needs to run on its own clock. Buying land at Boca Chica gave SpaceX a site it owned outright, so it could build, fly, and rebuild whenever it wanted.

The city came later, for an ordinary reason: someone had to govern the place. As the workforce and the buildings grew, the area needed local authority over services, roads, and land use, and incorporation put that authority in the hands of the people working on site.

How it Works

Starbase runs like a factory line that happens to point at space. Raw steel goes into the roughly 1-million-square-foot Starfactory, and finished vehicles roll out to the launch pad and the nearly 480-foot launch and catch tower, whose mechanical "chopstick" arms close around a returning Super Heavy booster. The Version 3 booster stands about 236 feet (72 meters) tall and has no landing legs, so the arms have to catch it in midair, with almost no room for a miss.

Starbase has launched 14 Starship test flights, each a full stack of Starship on top of Super Heavy: two in 2023, four in 2024, five in 2025, and three in 2026 through Flight 14, the first to reach orbit, on September 28.

Every booster caught instead of thrown away lowers the cost of the next flight, and SpaceX's Mars plan depends on that cost falling.

The Economics of Starbase

The town is small, and the factory is sized for a fleet: SpaceX's goal for the Starfactory is up to 1,000 Starships a year, far beyond today's output. By November 2025 Starbase had built more than three dozen Starships, and more than 3,400 people work at what is now SpaceX's headquarters.

Starbase Today

In December 2024 SpaceX asked Cameron County to let residents incorporate, and the vote on May 3, 2025 was not close.

Of 283 eligible voters, 212 said yes and 6 said no, in a town where nearly every voter shares the same employer. Starbase was formally incorporated on May 20, 2025, with SpaceX vice president Bobby Peden elected mayor, running unopposed, alongside commissioners Jordan Buss and Jenna Petrzelka. By February 2026 the city had approved its own police department.

What Comes Next

Pad 2 came online for the Version 3 vehicles: Booster 19 made the pad's first static fire, a ground test that lights the engines while the rocket is held down, on March 18, 2026, and Flight 12 launched from it in May. A second pad lets SpaceX ready one Starship while another flies. The city wants to grow too: in 2026 it moved to annex about 7,133 more acres of mostly empty land to its east, which would bring it to about 8,000 acres. In its Q3 2026 results, SpaceX also announced the planned development of Starbase, Louisiana, a next-generation spaceport designed to support thousands of Starship flights a year, with the first launch targeted for 2029.

The Bottom Line

Starbase builds and launches Starship, houses SpaceX's headquarters and, since May 2025, has its own city government, led by a SpaceX vice president as mayor.