Elon Musk settlements in Texas. Will the towns on Mars look like?
If we want to imagine how life on Mars may look like in the future, We should look at Starbase and Snailbrook. These are settlements – some already call them “cities” – which Elon Musk builds in Texas.
Starbase is referred to in the American media as “the youngest city in the United States”. It is located at the south of the South, on the Mexican Bay, because That's right Spacex rockets start from there Mussel.
Muska engineers not only work in Starbase on rockets, but also live here with their families. For now, these are only the first settlements. But is a unique architectural language being created here? What we see in the pictures gives the impression of a makeshift. All houses seem mobile, as if this city was only temporary.
In May this year, Texas Tribune published one of the first reports about the city. It depicts small, gray wooden houses, monotonously placed side by side. In gray plastic flower beds, petunas grow, and one of them painted an astronaut making a sign of peace. In the reportage of American correspondents “Tagesschau” you can see the main thoroughfare (“street memów”). Waveting palm trees, loosely scattered wooden bungalid, as in reports after hurricane, construction site. “Besides, there are several streets with palm trees, bungalows, houses and silver camping trailers,” reads.
Bust of Elon Musk near the Starbase base in TexasJoe Marino / UPI Photo via Newscom / PAP
On the road leading from Brownsville to Starbase The bust of Muska is about three meters highreminiscent of the Marx monument in Chemnitz (formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt). Street signs in the city/settlement are striking more than monotonous houses; They are painted with charming symbols of rockets. Indirect conclusion: decorations and art serve to mission, apartments are characterized by Puritan simplicity.
Starbase – this is how Martian architecture will look like?
The most important thing is the issue of houses. Musk not only builds them for employees, but also allegedly lives alone in one of them. This story fuels the imagination of Fake-News leading YouTube channels. Some fantasize about the houses in the style of the owner of Tesla. The basic model for 2026 will be allegedly available for only $ 6,789. [ok. 25 tys. zł].
The alleged Muska house combines the features of a retro fridge design with the Tesla logo towering above it, it is powered by a sunlight on the roof, has a kitchenette inside, laminated floor, LED lighting, bathroom and double bed. It looks similar to the most modern room in the IBIS hotel. The design is smooth, round and dominated by the screen, it is not unpleasant, but it is by no means cozy. This is a good place to relax and use entertainment electronics, but it also encourages you to spend a few extra hours in the office.
In fact, there is an older model, which allegedly costs 50 thousand. hole [ok. 183 tys. zł]. According to reports, Musk himself lives in this model on the beach in Starbase, in Boca Chica. Musk claimed the same, but his declaration was quickly questioned by the investigation of “Wall Street Journal”. Costing 50,000 hole. The house is a gray wooden hut with an area of 35 sq m with a small white garden fence. Boxabl, a company that delivered this “Muskowy” house, in 2021 talked about a list of 50,000. expecting customers. It is not known, however, how many of them were actually.
AnarchoCapitalist life of Elon Musk engineers
Starbase may not become a place of permanent residence, but a transient location, a place of transformation on the road to technical utopia. Anarchocapitalist vision seems not to take care of shaping here and now. Seemingly “utopian cities” for Empire X employees look like functionalistic camps.
Snailbrook and Starbase “with their simple accommodation are more like primitive factory towns” – so casually rated them by Harald Staun in the Sunday edition of “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. New photos of Bloomberg – which again show the new part of the estate – also confirm this impression: Sterile, tight buildings with small boards with dark tiles resemble the simplest residential containers. From the lawn to the door it is covered with steel stairs, and each of these blocks has a small external seating area for one or two people. The form brings to mind the splendor of the USA, the 1960s. Metal caravans in a long row shown in another YouTube movie also resemble nostalgic foodtrucki, but here they are used for sleeping.
Founding your own city in Texas is uncomplicated. Settlements of 200 or more people can announce a city if most of them want it, and the requirements for buildings are low as anywhere else. The administration is to some extent in the hands of the company. The mayor of Starbase Bobby Peden, a 36-year-old mechanic engineer, is a long-term employee of SpaceX. The community, which currently has only a few hundred inhabitants, is largely governed by its own laws – it is a foretaste of utopian “free settlements on Mars”, which Musk presents as a great vision.
The city was founded quickly. Spacex only submitted a petition in December 2024. The consent of the residents was considered certain, because almost all of them earn for life in SpaceX. The engineer and director at SpaceX Kathryn Lueders wrote Cameron to the authorities to accelerate this process, stating that this place should become a “world -class place to live”, and Its inhabitants will “shape the future of humanity in space”.
The main construction phase is to come. Texas Tribune announced that Spacex wants to build a shopping center in the vicinity for $ 15 million. [ok. 55 mln zł] and other office and factory buildings: “Starbase is in fact a company city”. The newspaper reminded the stories of the town of Sugar Land, also in Texas, founded in 1959.
Sugar Land town in TexasKamil Zelezik / Shutterstock
However, this foundation was preceded by about 100 years of economic activity: sugar cane cultivation, sugar production and intensive forced work of black slaves, later also prisoners. Imperial Sugar Company, founded in 1908, founded in 1959 the employee city of Sugar Land. However, the sugar industry was abandoned there in 2003 a In connection with its long history, it is significantly ahead of Muska. It is a large city with the town hall, squares, fountains, hotel and administrative buildings and a typical extensive urban buildings with gardens and golfing fields.
Although the history of exploitation in sugar factories is ambiguous (only a few years ago the graves of black forced laborers who could be tortured) were discovered), they still leave relics full of character. The refinery, built in 1896, is inscribed on the list of monuments and serves as a museum. Auditorium built in 1918 in the neoclassical style and the Primary School from around 1900 in the Neocolonial Beaux-Arts style can be visited to this day. Will anything stay from Musk's “company city”?
Cities of the future or workers' barracks?
However, the second workers' settlement already exists. His name is Snailbrook and is a good 1000 km northeast of Starbase, near the Texan capital of Austin. According to the first illustrated reports in the regional press, there are still more construction sites here than buildings.
However, the first impressions are similar to those from Starbase: Wooden houses are monotonous – much more monotonous than ordinary American suburbs with cozy verses, fences and small gardens – And arranged almost like barracks. The fences around do not look encouraging either. Meanwhile, “Wall Street Journal” reported where Musk himself is to live: mainly in Austin, which is not too far, but not too close to Snailbrook.
Can we already talk about Musk style architecture? Or maybe antiarchiture? The first phase of construction does not reveal the ambitions of aesthetic values, durability or citizenship. The historical comparison with workers' housing estates from the beginning of the 20th century seems interesting – For example, with houses of railwaymen or miners from the 1920s, such as those ordered by Alfred Krupp in the Ruhr Zagłębie Basin or between Rhine and Main. Today, they are often buildings inscribed on the list of architectural heritage and admired for their simple beauty. They were to enable employees and workers to lead the most bourgeois family life, protecting them from then shocks, and thus separating them from communism.
In the towns of Muska, architectural idea turns around the billionaire himself, and The estates seem to serve the implementation of the mission as soon as possible. Ironically, the blands of petty -bourgeois of these “huts” stands in a clear contrast with the vision of the future of Musk, which is to move all humanity.
Snailbrook town in March 2023.Brandon Bell / Getty Images North America / Getty Images Via AFP / AFP
However, individual prestigious buildings (or their projects) are to send a message. Symbolically, they refer to spacecraft, UFOs, Batman and exude nostalgia at the 50s of the 50s. “Supercharging Station” is a special example. That's what it's called Connection of electrician charging stations, car cinema and pub in Los Angeleswhich should be completed “soon”, as reported by the Fanowski Inside Tesla portal. Musk announced its construction for the first time in 2018.
