9 years after SpaceX strode into Texas village, Elon Musk floats name change for Boca Chica: 'Starbase' Cryptocurrency enthusiast Elon Musk has attracted scorn after floating the idea of changing the name of Boca Chica, Texas, to "Starbase." The village, established in the late 1960s, and formerly known as Kopernik Shores, is the south Texas launch site of Musk's private space exploration company, SpaceX. The firm first …
"The next prototype, Starship SN10, could take flight as soon as today"
The attempt to not crash SN10 is indeed scheduled for today (Wednesday March 3rd 2021), between 9am & 6pm local time (3pm to midnight UK time)
It can be watched here:- NasaSpaceflight on Youtube (Not an official NASA channel).
Icon chosen for obvious reasons.
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"Icon chosen for obvious reasons."
The icon was well chosen as despite a "bang on the button" landing, about 8 minutes later it did go "Boom" - seems it might have had too heavy a landing and an internal fire ruptured something and some propellant leaked causing an RUD.
But the data they collected should be fine for SN11...as long as they can slow it down a bit more on landing !
On the other hand, I have a bit of a problem understanding what the state has to do with the naming of an industrial location. For the state, what is important is the address and the size. Musk can rename it every day if he wants, I don't see that that has any impact on the state.
It is actually an unincorporated village (whatever that means) of about 40 houses, Musk is trying to buy out the village and may eventually get the County to use Eminent Domain to compulsorily purchase the houses out from under the residents.
Here is an interesting article about it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/space-x-texas-village-boca-chica/606382/
Well, among other things, it's a village with people living in it. Maybe, since he doesn't live there and they do, they should be the ones choosing the name. The relevant laws seem to have various requirements that make this harder. Described here, they have restrictions on how many people must be present to incorporate (looks like you need at least 600). If it needs to be big enough to hold the launch facility, they will need more as the population limit goes up depending how much space you're going to include. Then, you need those people to vote in favor of the incorporation including the name and governance structure.
I'm sure Musk and Spacex would really love to own their own city where they can set any local laws they want, but it's not as simple as that since they have to deal with all the people living there and they actually have to have people living there to do it. If they think they can get all their employees to move somewhere and vote in favor, that could work, but otherwise they're going to have to actually convince people to go along with it. I'm seeing little in it for anyone who doesn't run Spacex.
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