"Further investment will cement Texas as the preeminent location for innovation."
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Texas is planning to make a huge public investment in space
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That would benefit actual people, and not large corporations run by people who make more money in a day than some people in Texas make in a year. Clearly the billionaires need the money more!
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Certain specific Texas educational institutes get oil and gas money, as allocated a long time ago. UT, Texas A&M, etc. The newer lottery and gambling money was supposed to go to support more general education, but the details can be a little obscure.
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When I worked on the budget staff for the Colorado state legislature, there were a couple of years where I poked around the Governor's Office of Economic Development. The way they described it was that they dealt with two kinds of companies. The first group were looking for minimum wage labor, low taxes, and as few regulations as possible. Those they generally brushed off. The second group paid above average wages and were interested in the state's educated workforce, communication and transportation infrastructure, the university system, quality of life issues (examples being hiking to the performing arts center and everything in between) and only at the end of their list were they concerned about taxes and regulation. Those got as much information as they wanted, help scouting locations, etc.
It's been some years now, but my understanding is the first group doesn't bother with Colorado any more now that our state minimum wage is pushing $15/hour. OTOH, we have the second most aerospace workers among states, and easily the most per capita.
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Long ago, when I was a graduate student in Austin, the way it was explained to me was like this. To get federal land-grant status (and benefits), the state had to cede 1% of the state's area to the university system. That could be little pieces widely distributed or all concentrated in one area. The state ceded a million acres of then-worthless high-plains almost-desert around Midlands/Odessa. Only a few decades later did they discover it was floating on oil.
At some point it was so much money that the legislature made the universities invest the oil revenues, and only spend the income from those investments. While I was in Austin, UT decided to build a new life sciences building. The Regents chose the proposal they liked, and simply wrote a check for it. The University of Texas system has the second largest endowment in the country. The Texas A&M system has the eighth largest. Combined, they're considerably larger than any of the Ivies that are noted for having large endowments.
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How much does that change with launch/recovery platforms a few miles offshore?
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As much as I might like to agree with you, I think it was setup that way because Disney owned most if not all of the property, habitable, in a county. As they would be paying all the taxes and requiring all the maintenance it was decided that they would govern it themselves. Simplified structure. I know it was something similar to this at least...
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I've heard of similar things in California and Texas. If the company puts in some apartment buildings and offers subsidized rent for employees, they can get a sufficient population to become an incorporated "town". With an on-site manager elected as mayor.
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Don't forget, a rising tide floats all boats, even it kills people not on a yacht.
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If the Texas economy is so heavily dependent on immigrant labor, you would think they would be promoting federal immigration reform to allow proper documentation of their critical labor force, rather than trying to send them all back home.
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Why would they? The Boca Chica launch site is 5km from the border, and the Mexican side is the same sort of alluvial plain that makes the land around Boca Chica nearly useless. The nearest road is another 15km south of the border. The launch exclusion zone would disrupt the handful of fishermen that wade into the waters at Faro Bagdad, and little else.
As for anyone other than SpaceX, there's really not enough stable land there for anyone else to try to set up shop next door. Even SpaceX has not been able to get further expansion plans approved.
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Their fossil fuel infrastructure is still in high demand.
They're building out a lot of wind and solar. How much of that manufacturing and construction is based in Texas, to export to neighbors and take the place of petrochemicals in the coming decades?
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Texas Republican voters are not too bright, and Texas Republican officials know what The Base likes.
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Looking through your posting history… is your tactic to post something innocuous, and then to go back and replace it with AI-generated spam several days later, so it doesn’t trigger as new activity for people to notice?
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I didn't see a followup article from @EricBerger - but the Texas Space Commission bill passed
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