Left Behind
The employment potential -- including about 600 directly employed by SpaceX -- is more significant for the local economy. In the region near the launch site, at Boca Chica Beach in the state’s southernmost tip, two of five residents live in poverty. Leaders of the historically impoverished border town are seeking to make it as well known for space travel as Houston, home of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Some current and former Texas lawmakers say the state shouldn’t give away revenue in exchange for jobs.
“A lot of money is given to people that doesn’t benefit but a few people,” said A.R. “Babe” Schwartz, a lobbyist who served in the legislature for 26 years until 1981. “It’s good for whoever got the money and for the lobbyists who got it.”
The Texas negotiations started with SpaceX’s telling Republican Governor Rick Perry’s staff of its interest in early 2011, said Josh Havens, an aide to Perry at the time.
Perry’s office called Gilberto Salinas, executive vice president of the Brownsville Economic Development Council, which recruits businesses, as he was on his way to dinner to celebrate his son’s birthday.
Billionaire Founder
Three weeks later, Salinas and four other people from Brownsville met with Musk, who also started PayPal, the Internet payment system, and Tesla Motors Inc., an electric car company, at the company’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters, Salinas said. Musk, 42, has a fortune of $9.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He founded SpaceX in 2002 to build and launch rockets to serve the International Space Station. The company has conducted launches at the Kennedy Space Center to supply the space station under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and in December won the right to lease a launch pad there.
During the meeting, Musk described his dream to take people to Mars, Salinas said. He also said Texas needed to compete with other states.