Phil “Hardman” Fasone / Sci-Fi Author

In September 2014, Elon stood under a tent on an almost empty beach at the very tip of South Texas, waves crashing just over the dunes, and broke ground on a launch site. In May 2025, he stood in front of a crowd at that same corner of Texas and said it plainly: "not that long ago, there was basically nothing here." Now it's a city. Literally. On May 3, 2025, Starbase voted to incorporate, 212 to 6. In Elon's words, "the first new city made in America in I think quite a few decades." I love the "I think." Even his victory laps come with error bars. What gets me is how it got there. One of the first things to fly was Starhopper, a stubby steel tank on legs that he calls "the original sort of Mad Max rocket." In August 2019 it hopped 150 meters. Then came prototypes that flew, flipped and sometimes exploded in full public view, right next to a public highway. That's his pattern. Pick the thing everyone says is impossible, build it in the open, break it, learn, build the next one, and keep going until the laughing stops. "In the space of about five or six years... we've built a small city... and a gigantic rocket factory for a gigantic rocket." Then in October 2024 the rocket came home and the launch tower caught it. His reaction: "it's really mind-blowing that the SpaceX team has been able to catch the largest flying object ever made multiple times." My favorite detail? You can just go and look. Anyone interested in seeing the largest flying object on Earth "can come here anytime they want and just drive down the public highway and see it." Name another place where you can watch the future get welded together from your car window. Why does a sandbar in Texas matter to me, thousands of kilometers away? Because it proves you don't need permission to build the future. You need a team, a beach, and the stubbornness to stay on it. The mission hasn't changed since the groundbreaking: "to take humanity and civilization and life as we know it to another planet for the first time in the 4 and a half billion year history of Earth." And the line I keep coming back to: "we can be out there among the stars making science fiction no longer fiction." From empty dunes to a city that builds Mars ships. I made a short film about it.