The last time SpaceX launched a rocket in South Texas, charter boat captain Eddie Reyes was on a pontoon boat less than 2 miles from the pad with a group of paying passengers. Flames erupted, shockwaves rattled the boat and the rocket climbed into the sky.

For Reyes and his family, the arrival of SpaceX has brought real opportunity. Since the establishment of Starbase, Elon Musk’s company town built around SpaceX’s rocket operations, his charter boat business has grown as space enthusiasts flock to the area for a glimpse of the launches. His nephew works at SpaceX as a welder and drives a Tesla Cybertruck.

But the same rockets Reyes sees lifting his family’s fortunes are also shaking his mother’s home. Shockwaves from launches have cracked the ceiling, loosened window seals and damaged the foundation. She is among dozens of residents now suing Musk’s company over damage they say was caused by SpaceX launches.

“You can’t stop progress,” Reyes said.

Many people in the Rio Grande Valley, the South Texas region surrounding Starbase, have reached a similar conclusion. They are willing to ride the wave of Musk’s interplanetary ambitions and accept the consequences that come with it.

SpaceX’s rapid expansion has brought jobs, visitors and global attention to the region. But it has also fueled lawsuits, environmental concerns and a growing divide among the 1.4 million residents of the Rio Grande Valley.

Those pressures are expected to intensify after SpaceX’s record-setting $1.75 trillion IPO on Friday, which will raise $75 billion partly to scale Starship from intermittent test launches to potentially weekly flights.

“This company is literally shaking the earth,” said Tino Villarreal, a city commissioner in Brownsville, a city of 185,000 people bordering Starbase. “By the amount of workforce it wants to produce, by the actual wavelengths that are shaking our soil.”

SpaceX declined to comment for the story.

The clashing realities of Starbase were underscored ahead of last month’s Starship launch, when contract worker Jose Bautista, 25, suffered a fatal fall at a nearby SpaceX facility. The incident was first reported by the San Antonio Express-News. Bautista was the latest SpaceX worker to die or suffer serious injuries in Musk’s rush to colonize Mars.

A TikTok video posted by local policy researcher Etienne Rosas, demanding that the company take accountability, drew thousands of likes. A cousin of Bautista thanked him in the comments and wrote that “my family is in need of prayers.”

Others defended SpaceX in response, arguing that the company was not responsible for Bautista’s death. One commenter, who did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment, wrote that “Projects of magnitude like the Hoover Dam for example always claim many lives and the project continues. It’s the American way.”

A spokesperson for the City of Starbase declined to comment. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is investigating the incident, declined to comment. A representative for Bautista’s family also declined to comment, and the Cameron County Sheriff’s Office directed Reuters’ requests to SpaceX.

SpaceX, which did not respond, has not publicly acknowledged Bautista’s death.

When construction began on the SpaceX site in Boca Chica in 2014, the area was a small cluster of homes near the Mexican border and a popular beach for Brownsville residents. Today, two launch sites tower almost 500 feet above the beach and nearby communities of Airstream trailers, tiny homes and new mansions.

SpaceX hopes one day to manufacture components for as many as 1,000 Starships in the town’s Starfactory, a 1 million-square-foot advanced manufacturing facility, and in the Gigabay, a 380-foot-tall structure used to assemble the rockets.

The town has its own oddities. Bobby Peden, a SpaceX employee, was elected mayor last year soon after Starbase was incorporated. The town is setting up a police force and has discussed opening its own municipal court, where Peden would serve as interim judge.

At the local school, Ad Astra, young children are taught to work “with numbers into the thousands – far beyond kindergarten standards,” according to the school’s website. The local bar, Astropub, is open only to SpaceX employees.

“When I showed up, we had one street with houses, we were building rockets in tents, and we didn’t have water or a sewer system,” said Kathryn Lueders, who was general manager of Starbase before it was incorporated. Now, she said, “you’re raising families, and you’re raising children in this community that is Starbase, that’s also got a launchpad in its back yard. It’s a really cool thing.”

Like the Mars colony depicted in a massive mural on the side of Gigabay, Starbase serves as a potential model for future interplanetary colonies. On a recent evening ahead of a Starship launch, the streets buzzed at 5 p.m. as employees streamed out of Starbase buildings on bicycles, while convoys of Cybertrucks lined the highway to Brownsville, passing sculptures of Musk and a sign reading: “Mars Embassy. Future Location.”

“I’ve been to NASA, and you don’t get anywhere near something like this,” said Nicholas Poindexter, a pest-control worker and space enthusiast who traveled from Indiana to see the Starship launch. “Last time I was here I thought, holy cow, you could throw a rock and hit” a rocket.

Many local officials have welcomed Starbase as a boon to one of the poorest regions in the United States. An impact report produced in March by the Greater Brownsville Economic Development Corporation said Starbase had created 5,000 jobs and brought in $100 million in tourism revenue over the past year.

Wearing a SpaceX Starship T-shirt, Villarreal pointed out new restaurants serving an increasingly affluent workforce, standing between boarded-up storefronts and rundown homes.

Musk “has moved at the speed of light, and I think that’s helped Brownsville also really move a lot faster in our growth and development,” Villarreal said. “It’s injected a steroid into Brownsville.”

Some Rio Grande Valley residents initially welcomed SpaceX. Maria Pointer had lived in the region for almost two decades when she sold her home to SpaceX in 2020 after meeting Musk.

“We were excited,” she said. “I really felt, at the time, that we deserved the moon as the gas station to wherever all the Elons of the world wanted to go in interstellar space.”

Over time, Pointer said, her optimism faded and the town became less welcoming. In April, she went to Starfactory to film an interview with an Italian news crew beneath a huge X near the entrance to the building, at the site where her kitchen once stood. A security guard approached and ordered them to leave.

“It was very military,” she said.

Other residents of neighboring towns, including Laguna Vista, Port Isabel and South Padre Island, say Starship launches are damaging their homes, according to a class-action lawsuit filed against SpaceX in April.

One plaintiff, who declined to speak on the record at her attorney’s direction, showed Reuters her Port Isabel home. Cabinets sat unevenly, doors no longer closed and chipboard covered warped flooring she said had been damaged by mold after a shower pipe burst following a rocket launch.

She estimated foundation repairs at about $100,000, more than half the home’s value.

“They’re wanting to get to Mars,” she said. “But what about us that are here? I’m here now. And nobody is thinking about us.”