Wandering Rockets and Beaches--Starbase and Boca Chica

Note: We're including some blogs from the month of April that were interrupted when we had to make a speedy trip to Oklahoma to help after Denisa's Mother's house burned. So we are catching up with "old blogs" while we are still helping out in Oklahoma.

For the last two months, Denisa has wanted to make the trip to see Elon Musk's outer space experiment about 20 miles from Brownsville, Texas. We had heard that the rockets were in plain sight, and we soon found that was accurate information.

Elon Musk has named this piece of lonely property in the middle of the salt flats just a mile from the ocean, "Starbase." 

Starbase is located on seldom-used-narrow-two-lane-highway 4. This is a 20-mile highway, that leaves from Brownsville, Texas, and ends at Boca Chica Beach. That beach is another place that we had also never visited. We tried to come here last month, but highway 4 closed that afternoon. We found that happens very often whenever they are planning any "maneuvers" here at Starbase. So we were glad to see the road open today, and we followed a truck the entire 20 miles. He delivered another load of concrete to the busy construction site. Starbase is obviously growing.

Besides getting a good view of the rockets from highway 4, we were surprised to see that we were allowed to make a left turn down the paved road that ended at the foot of the three newest rockets.

There was no fence, and no gate with a guard. We could drive so close that we couldn't even get the entire rockets into the frame of our cell phones.

On this short road, we also saw that Elon Musk likes his rockets AND his RVs to be silver and shiny. We found a trailer park filled with Airstream trailers among the construction vehicles and the palm trees.

We're a ways from any lodging possibilities, so they have built a shiny silver village of Airstreams parked on artificial turf.

Back near the highway, we stopped to see the interesting statue displayed on a pickup truck, with the rockets in the background. It was sculpted by a Sicilian artist, based on a 1932 photo of ironworkers sitting on a steel beam atop the 70-story RCA building. 

The original sculpture sat at Ground Zero after 9/11, and now this copy is on this mobile base--hoping that Mr. Musk would want to buy it and make it a permanent part of Starbase.

It looks like Musk purchased almost all of this desolate land. But one property owner must have refused to sell. We're guessing that this private property for sale is available at a premium.

While most of the activity is close to the rocket ships, we saw evidence of other technology as we drove by other gates on the Starbase property.

Another half-mile down highway 4, and we found the launch pad site.

Vehicles lined the side of the road, waiting for the planned maneuvers of the day. We asked the people with their big cameras trained on the site, and found out that they were waiting for the crane to move this huge rocket section onto the launch pad.

They also told us that one of the stabilizers on the pad appeared to be stuck. So the maneuver was at a stand-still for now. Some of the spectators had driven long distances, and had been watching since 7:00 this morning.

After seeing no advancements for 15 minutes, we decided to drive the last few yards down Highway 4 to Boca Chica Beach. We were ready to get our feet in the ocean.

It's amazing to see how close we were to the launch site while strolling on the beach.

We weren't the only ones strolling on the beach on this beautiful blue sky day.

While Denisa was picking up things on the beach, she was NOT dipping her beak into the sand like some of the other strollers.

She is always picking up shells, and then using them to spell something in the sand. Today's word is "Spacex"--the name of the Space Exploration company that Elon Musk founded in 2002. Spacex built Starbase here near Boca Chica Beach.

While Denisa was playing with sea shells, Mark was photographing the crabs scuttling sideways across the sand.

It is still amazing to us that we can be so close to nature, and so close to this space-age launch site.

We couldn't help but notice that the blooms of the Spanish dagger yucca look a little like the cones of the rocket ships. Our day of wandering Starbase and Boca Chica feels like an odd mix of God's wonders and man's search for the heavens.