“A Community Destroyed,” reads a slogan in the trailer for a new documentary about a small neighborhood just steps from Elon Musk’s SpaceX facility in South Texas.
Airing tonight (September 21) is “Vice Versa: Between Musk and Mars” (10pm, Vice TV). The producers present it as an investigation into what happens when SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk “moves in next door and brings his rockets with him.”
Musk, they say, is quietly organizing a takeover of the tiny Texas retirement village of Boca Chica, where he hopes to launch his rockets, house his employees, build a mock Martian village, and possibly send 1 million people to Mars from here. 2050. In the process, they claim, it destroys a wildlife corridor and forces local retirees out of their homes and communities.
“I went from a beautiful and peaceful vacation home to a war zone,” says one resident.
“You have to get out of your house to avoid injury,” said another, reading a warning sent to her.
On the flip side, Musk is also creating jobs and diversifying the economy of one of the poorest counties in the United States.
“Between Musk and Mars” provides an overview of the holdouts who refuse to leave the isolated village and the tactics used by SpaceX to get them out of their homes. It is a battle that has been covered extensively in a story in the atlantic earlier this year.
