There’s no doubt that both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have towering egos. In fact, Musk’s ambition to “turn human beings into an interplanetary species” is at least a couple of orders of magnitude more vaunting that Trump’s desire to skim, scam, sleep around, and get two scoops of ice cream on his chocolate cake. Since Trump moved into his new residence, the two men haven’t had that much to argue about—though Trump’s using the excuse of GM closing some plants to end all electric vehicle credits is certainly a shot at Musk’s Tesla corporation. However, they’re about to have an even more direct conflict, because Trump’s “Great Wall” is about to cross directly through the area where Musk is slated to test his “Big Falcon Rocket.”
As the New York Times reports, it was Rick Perry—then Texas governor, now Trump’s energy secretary—who accompanied Musk to dig golden shovelfuls of dirt from what would be SpaceX’s South Texas launch facility near Brownsville. As the site Teslarati reports, activities at the South Texas facility have been increasing in the second half of 2018 as SpaceX approaches the first test of the rocket that’s supposed to replace the workhorse Falcon 9, become the first 100 percent reusable space vehicle, and carry human beings to Mars.
That rocket, which was until recently known as the BFR—the Big something Rocket, with the F standing in for “Falcon” in polite company—has been most recently re-dubbed “Starship,” presumably so science fiction fan Musk can drop a few names, like Enterprise, on the individual craft. Starship, a vehicle projected to be large and powerful enough to send people to Mars 100 at a time, is slated to begin doing tests at the South Texas site in 2019, similar to the “hop tests” SpaceX conducted with the Falcon 9 in 2014 and 2015. Those earlier tests were also conducted at the Texas site. But even compared with the office-building sized Falcon 9, Starship will be enormous.
But while SpaceX is building the enormous structures that form this towering new rocket, there’s an obstacle in their way that’s even bigger because the plan for Trump’s border wall cuts right across SpaceX’s property. Construction of that wall would definitely interfere with SpaceX’s plans for the next two years, and potentially make the property useless for the purpose for which it was purchased. SpaceX could quite easily be left with a rocket testing ground no longer suitable for testing rockets.
Musk isn’t alone. The proposed route for the wall cuts across private land belonging to thousands of companies and individuals. Building the wall would require forcing every one of those land owners to either sell or have their land seized. Either way negotiations and court costs can be expected to make the genuine cost of the wall astronomically higher than Trump wants to admit—pun intended.
And, no matter what Trump says, not one foot of new wall has been built. However, that is slated to change in 2019.
The very first section of Trump’s border wall, all of six miles long, is slated to start construction in February. That section won’t cross the SpaceX property, but another section of what’s expected to become the wall’s earliest phase would cut across the property.
The SpaceX issue will get visibility, because it’s hard to be more visible than the headline grabbing Musk and a giant rocket to Mars. But the problems that his company is facing will be duplicated over and over again, at family farms, private homes, state and local parks, and facilities of all sorts, as Trump puts up his monument to xenophobia and waste. That includes a threat to fliers much smaller than an enormous rocket.
All of this points up just why Trump has been so insistent that “big sections” of his wall have already been built before the first inch has been laid down—because getting this thing constructed, is much, much less likely than sending people to Mars. But then, Trump doesn’t have to build it to satisfy his base. He just has to lie about it.
SpaceX first “hop test” of the Falcon 9R at Texas site. Still almost unbelievable four years later.
Animation of proposal to use Starship as a high speed transport between points on Earth.