Texas is planning to make a huge public investment in space

"Further investment will cement Texas as the preeminent location for innovation."

See full article...

 

[wagnerrp]

Texas has a large population of illegal immigrants, who often work "off the books" ... i.e. would not pay income taxes.

Texas has a relatively high sales/VAT and property taxes to make up for the lack of an income tax. The added benefit of that it is much more difficult to avoid sales and property taxes. So both legal and illegal residents end up contributing to the state taxes.

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.

 

[wagnerrp]

Boca Chica, SpaceX. How much say or influence does Mexico have on SpaceX operations, launches and risk of RUDs?
Currently at work, so can't do a lot of research into this, this will have to wait till later.
If Texas wants to invest more into space launch initiatives, can the Mexican government interfere?

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.

 

[wagnerrp]

To be fair, Texas is one of the few Red states that pay in more than they take out.

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?

 

[wagnerrp]

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?