This story was published by The Brownsville Herald, one of the few papers left in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), where I live. We moved to South Padre Island (SPI) in 2016 and Musk moved into Boca within a year of us arriving. I thought the idea of rockets launching from where we could see them was pretty cool, until they started launching.
We have had a bait-and-switch here, as the story shows below. What Musk is launching now from Boca Chica are rockets that are 10x more powerful than his Falcon rockets, which was supposed to be what was happening on Boca. But Musk decided to upgrade the area to launch his (super duper heavy) Starship, the "most powerful rockets ever launched". And the regulators shrugged their shoulders and said, "cool."
While living on SPI, we could have joined this lawsuit. We had multiple cracks develop in our ceiling but decided to patch them up and sell the fucking house before it disintegrated around us. Musk currently has permission to launch 25 times per year from Boca, but he wants to scale up to three rockets per day once they get rolling. Daily. Three rockets up, three returning boosters, at least 3 mega-sonic booms per day. SPI would be unlivable. Let me tell you, these sonic booms created by Musk and Starship are not your grandparents sonic booms. These are make your heart skip a beat and knock you down loud. I am very glad to see the locals have had enough.
Nearly 60 Valley households sue SpaceX over damage to homes from launches
By Montserrat Pagan - May 1, 2026
More than 50 plaintiffs on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against SpaceX alleging that sonic booms from the company’s test launches at Boca Chica Beach are damaging their homes. The lawsuit was filed by 58 households in Port Isabel, South Padre Island and Laguna Vista.
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The lawsuit says the Boca Chica Beach location was intended to be a commercial space port for existing Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
“In 2018, however, SpaceX dedicated the site exclusively to the development and launch of its next-generation Starship vehicle. To accommodate this program, SpaceX acquired hundreds of acres of coastal land, transforming a quiet beach community into a sprawling industrial spaceport and manufacturing complex,” the petition said. “Starbase is now the exclusive testing, launching, and landing site for the largest rockets in human history.”
At the spaceport’s launch pads, there are massive integration and catch towers that are the tallest launch towers in the world, the petition said. “SpaceX deliberately constructed this colossal, skyscraper-sized infrastructure mere miles from coastal residential communities,” the document stated.
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The petition details the “colossal” size of the launch site’s infrastructure, with the Starship spacecraft and its Super Heavy Booster standing as tall as a 30 story building when prepared for flight. The Super Heavy Booster relies on 33 Raptor 2 engines to lift onto the launch mount, according to the document.
They burn liquid oxygen and methane propellants which “collectively generates 16.7 million pounds of thrust,” the lawsuit states. The engines’ power creates a “violent aeroacoustic phenomena.” “By comparison, Starship generates nearly twice the thrust as NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) and nearly ten times the thrust of SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rocket,” the lawsuit continued.
the rest is
here
https://russblib.blogspot.com
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