The first time I visited Starbase, it was for the IFT-5 attempt. I never saw the launch. This time, standing in the cool evening air, the silhouette of Starship and its booster towering in the distance, I couldn’t help but marvel at how much had changed in such a short time. At Starbase, the future doesn’t wait around for nostalgia. It builds, iterates, and builds again.
Some changes were immediately obvious. No longer could pedestrians wander along the Mars Mural up to the rocket garden. A guard now stood watch, ensuring everyone stayed back. The growing infrastructure—new cryo facilities, lower buildings, and a second launch tower under construction—had reshaped the landscape. And yet, the accessibility remained astounding. A short walk from the highway, past wooden stakes with purple tops marking the border between the National Seashore and SpaceX land, brought me within a few hundred yards of the base of Starship itself.
This close to history in the making, the atmosphere was electric. The crowd was as varied as the sky was vast—young, old, families, solo travelers, engineers, and die-hard fans. Everyone had a camera, be it a DSLR, a phone, or something in between. SpaceX shirts were everywhere, as were NASA shirts, a silent nod to the connection between the old and the new. I had worn my IFT-6 Tekzilla shirt, a quiet tribute to my own growing history with this place.
Starbase is not a place for reflection. It doesn’t preserve the past so much as it consumes it in the pursuit of progress. Seeing how quickly everything had evolved, I thought of Apollo’s Launch Pad 39-A. For me, that pad was synonymous with shuttle launches, the crackling roar of solid rocket boosters, and missions that defined my childhood. Now, a new generation would know it only as the place where Starship was born. There’s something poetic about that, even if it makes me a little wistful.
And yet, Star Hopper still stands, a rare exception to the “iterate and move on” mentality. It seems destined for preservation—eventually. For now, it’s a relic in a place that barely acknowledges relics.
Then there was the Musk bust. A bronze-colored, Soviet-style bust of Elon Musk on the side of the highway. It caught me so off guard that I had to turn around and take a picture. Nearby, a spray-painted sign with his face and the words “Ad Astra” leaned against a fence. It was as strange as it was telling—proof of the cult of personality that has formed around this place, around this man. Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that he inspires a devotion normally reserved for revolutionaries, inventors, and the occasional rock star.
And speaking of the surreal, there was the banana. The payload for IFT-7 was, officially, a banana. This is an old reference to Apollo days, when a banana was painted onto a rocket for scale calibration in photos. Starship had its own banana stenciled onto the side, and apparently, that was enough to bring out an entire group of people dressed as bananas, gleefully taking pictures in front of the towering behemoth.
Only at Starbase.
Standing there in the fading light, surrounded by a crowd that had traveled from all over just to be near this thing, I felt the enormity of it all. The sheer audacity of building something this massive, this powerful, and actually launching it. Starship is not a thought experiment. It’s real. It exists. And tomorrow, it will fly.
No matter what happens, they’ll build, iterate, and build again.
