Ten New US Cities: 2. Starbase
This is part 3 of the short series Where to Create Ten New Cities in the US.
The groundwork for this series came in these two articles:
The first two articles in this series are:
You don’t need to read them in order.
What’s the best place to propel the US into the future? The small circle on this map:
It’s the southernmost point in the contiguous US. That’s very useful for rockets.
The main limitation for rockets is their ability to escape the Earth’s gravity. Big ships burn tons of fuel. They carry so much fuel that a hefty share of it is burnt just to bring the rest of the fuel to orbit! As a result, rocket makers pursue any optimization that allows them to reduce a rocket’s fuel consumption.
One of these optimizations is to launch the rockets as close to the equator as possible: This is where the Earth’s surface moves the fastest because it’s the farthest from its rotation axis.
That means rockets leaving from the equator are already moving quite fast, and can use this existing speed to reduce the acceleration they need from fuel. The closer you are to the equator, the faster your rockets go, the less fuel they need to carry, and the more payload they can take to orbit.
That location has another upside: It’s on the coast, which means materials and supplies can be transported by ship, which is cheaper—and especially valuable for rockets, which are so huge that it’s hard for them to use roads!
But if you’re going to pick one coast, you’d rather have an east-facing coast rather than a westward one: As you can see in the animation above, the rocket is launched towards the east because that’s the direction of the Earth’s rotation. But if there’s an accident, you want the debris to fall into the sea, not on somebody’s head. By launching a rocket from an eastern coast, you can send it eastward, and if it fails, it falls into water.
Boca Chica is this unique place where it’s:
In the contiguous US, for easy road supplies
As far south as possible, to use less fuel in rockets
On the coast, for easy water transportation
On an eastern coast, so that failed rockets and debris fall into water
These are the same reasons why the other famous launching site is Cape Canaveral. But notice how it’s farther north than Boca Chica in Texas, while Florida’s southernmost point is actually farther south than Boca Chica:
The problem is the Bahamas: Launching from the southernmost point in Florida would expose the Bahamas to debris from rocket explosions. Not so in Cape Canaveral. But then Canaveral is much farther north than Boca Chica, so Boca Chica ends up best overall.
This is why SpaceX launches its rockets from here:
Today, Starbase in Boca Chica is quite small:
But eventually, it will become something much bigger: the gateway to Mars.
It will need launchpads, terminals, a bigger port, hotels for the people traveling to Mars, fuel storage, and a big city full of amenities for the engineers and other workers who come to build the future of humanity.
For that, we need a new city. This is exactly what SpaceX is trying to achieve by incorporating Starbase:
Luckily, there is some federal land in the area, which could easily be repurposed to expand Starbase.
In summary, the US could build the world’s first spaceport city, a city that would look forward into the future, and up into the stars. A city where people could make a better future, rather than be scared of the mistakes of our past.
A city of dreams.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at the 3rd city I propose, one that could quickly become the most successful city on Earth, creating immense value extremely fast. Look for it in your inbox!
This series on new cities might be my favorite Uncharted Territories posts ever. They combine everything I love about Tomas’ writing: geography, economics, design, history, urban planning, meteorology, transportation, etc., into one predictive package. Well done!
Unfortunately, Starlink, Boca Chica village and the surrounding land have an average elevation of just one metre. With sea level rise and increasing hurricane strength likely, this does not seem such a good place to locate a major city. For US territories, the kilometre high mountains of Eastern Puerto Rico at latitude 18 degrees north and with the width of the Atlantic Ocean to the East may be a better place.