SpaceX's remote Texas outpost is taking law enforcement into its own hands. Starbase, the company town built around the Starship launch site, approved an ordinance Tuesday creating its own municipal police department after a $3.5 million contract with Cameron County's sheriff's office fell through. The move marks another step in SpaceX's unprecedented experiment in building a self-governing city from scratch in the isolated southern tip of Texas.
SpaceX's company town experiment just took a dramatic turn. Starbase, the isolated South Texas community built around the company's Starship development facility, is forming its own police department after a county law enforcement contract collapsed.
The city commission approved the ordinance during a special meeting Tuesday, authorizing up to eight police officers who could start patrolling within months. It's a striking development for a town with just a few hundred residents, most of them SpaceX employees or their families.
"There is a lot of assets here with the operations of SpaceX," Starbase city administrator Kent Myers told Valley Central. "Those assets need to be protected, and so the police department will play a critical part in protecting those assets."
The move comes after Starbase's initial attempt at contracted law enforcement fell apart spectacularly. Last year, the city struck a $3.5 million, five-year deal with the Cameron County sheriff's office that was supposed to provide two deputies on patrol at all times, with eight deputies total assigned to the detail.
But the arrangement never materialized as planned. "We didn't have a lot of success in finding deputies through the county, so we decided to change direction," Myers told Valley Central. Cameron County Sheriff Manuel Treviño suggested the contract's lack of civil service protections made recruitment difficult.
