During the live stream of the 1st Starship launch attempt on Monday, 17th April, SpaceX announced that in addition to Starbase, it is opening another facility in Bastrop, Texas.
This new facility is going to be used for Starlink hardware production. This new Starlink factory in Bastrop spans over 500,000 sq ft of manufacturing space.
Bastrop is a county in Texas that is located just outside of Austin, Texas and is also part of the Greater Austin metropolitan area.
According to the official announcement on Monday, SpaceX has already started hiring for this location.
“We have all kinds of openings in production and manufacturing for technicians, and leadership, and manufacturing engineers, all kinds of site support roles,” the SpaceX announcer said.
SpaceX also shared a rendered image of the Bastrop Starlink factory building. Interestingly, it shows a number of Tesla cars parked outside and a few Cybertruck pickup trucks as well.
A TDLR (Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation) filing from last year shows that SpaceX acquired 521,521 ft 2 of land to build this new Starlink facility.
TDLR records refer to this construction as a “shell building”. This led to the impression that SpaceX is building a large warehouse in Bastrop, TX. But the most recent announcement by the private space venture shows that this is actually a production and manufacturing building.
According to the TDLR filing, the construction of the Starlink Bastrop factory started on 10th January 2022 and is scheduled to complete on 1st July 2023.
SpaceX found the perfect spot during a Starship launch attempt to announce the start of hiring for this new location. You can apply for a full-time job or internship by going to spacex.com/careers/ (remember to select Austin, TX as the location when applying to work at the Bastrop Starlink facility).
SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not.
Elon Musk
The new Starlink manufacturing facility in Bastrop is ideally located just 24.5 miles away from the Tesla HQ and Gigafactory in Austin, Texas. It is also just around 350 miles away from Starbase, Boca Chica, Texas. Giving Elon Musk and other executives the quick mobility they need to move across the businesses expanding throughout the state of Texas.
Giga Texas local observer Joe Tegmeyer also checked out this new Starlink building in Bastrop back in March and the main building construction seems to have been completed already.
As we can see in the pictures in the above tweet by Joe, there is a Boring Company tunnel opening in front of the Starlink Bastrop production building. This tunnel connects this building with the Boring Company HQ also located in Bastrop, TX.
Elon Musk’s The Boring Company has a significant presence in Texas and the company announced the completion of another tunnel in Bastrop a couple of weeks ago.
The perfect triangle of Elon Musk’s Tesla, Boring Company, and SpaceX is capturing the hearts and minds of Texans and providing a large number of employment opportunities as well. Starbase alone employs around 1,800 people according to SpaceX.
SpaceX is developing the next generation of Starlink satellites dubbed Starlink V2. A few prototypes of these new Starlink V2 satellites were spotted at Starbase last year which SpaceX plans to send to orbit via Starship in the future.
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Woah