Welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast. This is a show where we discuss the critical Crossroads, The Shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. And I'm your host, Will Walden. This podcast is brought to you by current Redefine your Banking with Current, The future of personal Finance. Manage your money smarter, faster, and on the go. No hidden fees, instant transaction alerts, and savings goals you can actually achieve. I've been using Current for years and they're a great
institution. If you'd like to get $50 by signing up to Current, please follow the link in the show notes Join Current Today and Experience Banking that Keeps up with You. So we don't do anything small and and you know we have obviously extra links got a small 8mm or 8mm stacks that are really are part of our what where we end up when you see a startling mission we end up sending out thousands of those to build out our constellation and then you have the size of Dragon.
But really what we've been building over the last 20 years is starting out with Falcon One, which was just A1 stick building the Falcon 9 program, continuing to build up capabilities with the Falcon 9 Heavy program. But as you can see, Starship is beating them all. It's got two times the thrust of a Saturn 5. When I was when I was in NASA, one of the things I I came in right well, at the very the middle stages of the shuttle program.
But there was a lot of people in the shuttle program that would, when I would go to shuttle launches, they would say, oh Kathy, the shuttle launch is nice, but man, I knew the launch you missed was a Saturn 5. And and now what is really cool last year is I was able to see a launch that was two times the thrust of a Saturn 5 just here in the Rio Grande Valley.
Really, really amazing. And this is the game changer I talked to you, if you can we can figure out how to get twice the mass up on our missions then it really enables so much more space exploration. Next slide. So I'd say, you know at the beginning we talked about the company starting in 2002. At the very beginning it was just about how do you build rocket engines.
And then it was about how do you begin to learn about launch building and launching rockets, which is what happened when we're working the the initial Falcons. And then it was about how do you build a medium class launch
vehicle. But as you can see, over the last 10 years we've been kind of speeding up, and we went from the Falcon 9 region's first orbit to the first spacecraft, private commercial spacecraft, going to the International Space Station in 2012 to beginning what is really a game changer. We reentry. People used to say if you that it was impossible to be able to return a first stage.
So going back to the goals of cost effective transportation, what's the most cost effective method is to not throw away your hard work, but to be able to return it, reuse it, turn around and flag it again. So that was another major game changer that SpaceX did to be able to get its cost of launch down. We had the Crew Dragon near and dear to my heart as I was a Commercial Crew Program Manager
for NASA. So the first mission that took US astronauts back to the ISS on AUS commercial vehicle occurred in in that May of 2020 time frame or 2021. And then we had the our first high altitude Starship flight in May of 2021. And then as you know, we're beginning to get ready. This April is a little bit of an old date, but we're actually getting ready at the vehicles ready now. We're getting ready to do our stacked test in our wet dresses over the next few weeks.
And then hopefully right after the Memorial Day weekend or close to it, we'll get our FAA license and be able to get ready for our next Starship launch. But this is a company that continues to learn, develop, make things better and grow and move to the next thing. And it's it's as you can see there's been a lot of growth over the last 15 years. So now I'm talking a little bit about Starbase.
So for us, we're very, when you see it now and you see we're actually in the process of really expanding the capability of our our little really at this little island at the end of Hwy. 4 and really and building it up for us to be the premier location for producing all of our starships and being one of the major launch sites for the star show. Next slide, obviously what's really, really important is you can't do this without a lot of people. This is one of my favorite pictures.
You know, every once in a while you've got to get everybody together. We had just stacked the vehicle for a flight in November and we got a bunch of people out. God took a picture because you had to like sit there and really appreciate the fact that we had rebuilt the path, got the vehicle stacked and we're ready to fly again for that second mission. But all of this needs like a
full production capability. When you're building the tallest rocket launch in catch shower, you have 500, almost 500 feet. So if you think about a story is in a in a building that's about 1010 to 12 feet where you're looking at A50 story building, that's the height of it. I mean when you're standing on Hwy. 4 looking up at the vehicles, it's a long ways up.
So you need to have towers and facilities to be able to maneuver the vehicle, be able to work on it and then get it ready, test it out and ready to fly. And we're going to talk a little bit too about we are expanding our village and our other capabilities out there because if you have over 2100 people there every day, just Spacexers
alone. And then on top of that, all of the contractors that are working in the pad at Starbase Village at the production area, you can imagine we have over 3000 people that are there every day working there that at the end of Hwy. 4, excellent. I appreciated the mentions of all the investment that SpaceX has done. I mean this is obviously been a major investment for the company. You know we've been putting in billions into this area to get the facilities ready to be able
to do that. It takes, it's not easy building at the end of IOA 4 and we've been building our star factories, our utility structures, our all of our support buildings for all the moves and everything else, plus homes, amenities and other things that we need to be able to support the families that also we're that are staying close to the production areas. So when you look at the numbers here, these numbers are growing. We're getting ready to put out
our new economic impact report. It'll be coming out over the next few weeks. And when you see those, these numbers are growing and growing as really also the communities are gaining the benefit of the missions. You know, it used to be before, you know, obviously when we were doing the Hopper missions, those were interesting, but there's nothing like an orbital flight. And so we we've been very happy that there that people are enjoying these missions and people are coming out to see them.
This the last mission I was out watching out at South Padre and it was really great to be there standing with a whole group of people that were cheering for us to be able to get that mission going. Next slide I will tell you one of the things that make our folks really happy is helping the communities and so want to sell as many jobs is to go bring
her out. How to engage in the community in a way that helps them but also lets our people really reach out and have an impact on the community. They do care and so some of the things that we do are obviously we do. We went to the to bark, we went to the dog shelter and painted buildings and watched dogs and a few people brought dogs home too. I think it was like a it was very smart in the shelter to have us come out. If there is one thing Spacexers
like is they like their dogs. But we've also packed lunches at at centers. We've we're a major sponsor of the turtle rescue. One of the favorite thing for our folks is to actually go out and be with the volunteers for the the Turtle Rescue Mission and and rescue. It's a major deal. When we actually find turtles and are able to like bring them on the hovercraft back over to the rescue facilities, you would have thought that, you know, we
had this cold snap. I can't believe how many people were out there rescuing turtles and then releasing them, but that being able to be part of the community, help the community, it's a big deal for the folks and one of our big draws. So next slide do it the. So a lot of things changing that's also a little bit of our recruiting videos. That's why you see the coffee and you see food like the dog park, a dog park for to keep the dogs occupied while their folks
are at work. Because really this is about us getting the work done. As you can see we there's a ton of work that needs to happen when you're building the Rockets. I mean we start out with rolls of steel on one end of the star factory and it comes out the
other end with boosters. And so you saw the the big high base, those are high base for us to be able to work on our boosters and our Starship. And the other thing I we if you notice the towers, a very different tower than what I grew up with, but it's another innovation to have what we call those chopsticks to be able to come in, grab the vehicle, be able to move it and use it for stacking.
It's another innovation where typically you'd either have to stack in a in a building and roll out or do like we do at the Cape, which is you have an Erector that actually pushes up that would be very, very tough to have that on a large Starship. So it's another innovation where we're trying to get to the place where we're able to have these vehicles come in, be able to to stack them, test them and then be able to launch because it's that launch cadence that's
really going to allow us to be able to get the amount of materials that you need to be able to do long term missions in space. So let me talk a little bit about straight, get a little sense of Star Basin and that video. We're actually going to have to do a new video because we don't have those tents anymore.
We right now have a huge star factory and you'll see it and and that with just Elon a year ago said, you know what, we need to get rid of these tents and we this is now going to be a permanent location for us to be producing and launching vehicles. So we're going to build a a Giga Starship factory and so we are in the process of building 1,000,000 square foot factory. We're actually pretty with you
drove down Hwy. 4 right now. You can see we've almost got all the corners pretty finished up. So it's been a huge endeavor for us. We're also bringing in and building. We've been building a office building so that we can consolidate our folks and office building and then we'll probably be in the process of building another highway. We are building a second pad right now too. So you can imagine that's a lot of building going along along with us building homes and
everything else. All of this is to get us ready to be able to start meeting the production and launch rate that we need to be able to accomplish our missions. So Starship is the largest, most powerful rocket in history. It's not just a little bit more powerful. Like I said before, it's two times as powerful as the Saturn 5, you know, 400 feet tall. And actually moving that up, we're actually extending it up with the pad and everything else. It's almost 500 feet.
So just standing at the bottom and looking up at it, it's pretty frickin amazing, designed to be reusable. We've talked before about the first stage, you know, on the importance of returning that we would. We're looking at bringing back and reusing the boosters and the star shifts. And so we're still figuring this out. You know, we're a big test.
You know, fly, really monitor and learn from each flight, obviously making sure that each mission is conducted in a way that is safe for the people and the general public that's out there. But it's OK for us to maybe not meet all the mission objectives because that's the best way for
us to learn. And so, you know, as we've been working through this, we've been using first the upper missions as the suborbital missions to be able to learn and then take that learning into our orbital missions. And each of our orbital missions we've taken a little bit farther based on the learning that we have that we gained from the last mission. And so we call these our orbital test flights. If you notice, they're not just
weird. We haven't jumped into the mission yet because we're still testing and we are learning on every flight as we're testing continuing to you know the first flag we got through the initial booster piece.
The second piece which we added the hot staging capability, which is really a capability that had not been done by any U.S. company before where you actually start your second stage, the the Starship part of the of the vehicle before you start the engines on there before you separate and and so to ensure that you're able to help with the separation of the
two vehicles. That all worked on our flight last November. And then the key thing out of this last March was and all we're talking about this in a few more missions is US really getting to those, those orbital flight test projectors. This is all people go, why are you doing this? So one of the reasons why we're doing this is because we are aiming towards being able to land and be the Lander for a human, for a NASA crew member on
the moon. And for us to be able to do that, we have to be able to have multiple missions. Tanker missions where we are being able to conduct and fill a tanker that's in orbit around the Earth and then fly a Starship up to the tanker, have it be fueled.
And then that tanker, that will be the fuel that then will take that Starship and fuel that Starship to be able to get to the moon, be able to rendezvous with a Orion spacecraft, and then be able to then land those crew members on the moon. All this is going to take us a lot of learning for us to be able to get these next steps, but we're continuing to buy down and prove out that capability as we work through our test
missions going forward. So there's some of those confirmations that we the. So it was what's been a lot of fun for me coming in from NASA is people it's the learning in these test flights that's so critical. And what's great about SpaceX is they're able to go say, Oh yeah, that yeah, that was kind of a big blow up. But guess what, we learned all these things here. That really is what enables us to make that progress faster. So it it it's a very different
concept. Companies typically view that having some people visible like that is viewed as a failure. But we actually learned a ton from this, and it's what's enabled us to not just be able to fly once every like three years, four years like we've been able to make successive engineering progress by being able to safely and. And for us, it's not a failure because we learned a bunch, but safely have the vehicle gracefully fail in a way that
still keeps people safe. But then we can make sure that we're learning from every vehicle. It's really, really hard to make sure a spacecrafts going to absolutely work when you're trying to build something that's never been done before, right. And so us being able to learn and enroll that learning back into very quickly is what's really enabled us to kind of push the envelope on a lot of these things very quickly. So let me just run through the
last few tests. I already kind of stuffed on or talked about each of these briefly before, but I wanted to give you kind of a contest before you saw that video. So we had our first integrated flight test a little over a year ago and it really established that the fact that Starship, that the booster was working and that and and verified the thrust and that we were able to show how the engines and the interaction of the engines were working together.
We had the second flight test in November. I was lucky enough to be able to be here at the time, all 39. It's amazing. It was an amazing thing for us because the booster actually worked perfectly. And so we were, we were able to launch and separate with the hot staging we had. We were able to get the Starship vehicle to an altitude we are. We like the engines and then be able to terminate the both the the Starship and the booster vehicles. That was for us an amazing
flight. Just being able to do that hot, first time ever hot staging all 33 engines worked. The relight of the Starship, all being able to see the the systems, all working on the major parts of the propulsion of the vehicle was huge for us. The other thing that was was a big deal when we had, you know, when you saw the pad, that pad design is also a very unique pad design.
Normally pads have huge flame trenches in them and one of the things that Elon had really wanted to prove was to see if we could do a clean pad interface. Well we ended up finding out on the first mission that didn't work really well, so we had to re engineer, add a water diverter system to and then that helps protect the concrete surface of the pad. And we ended up finding out that that worked beautifully on the
November mission. I was able to go out and walk the pad right after the mission and we it it it looked beautiful. The reason we want to do that is because it's another place where if we don't need to refurbish flame trenches, we don't need to be refurbishing the pad after every launch. It lets us be able to get the next vehicle up and be able to launch it quickly. So it's another place where Elon's really pushing us to be able to get into this flight cadence that we need to be able
to do our missions. This accomplishment help hold for. Stage 4 Stage 2 That's. It.
The so where you could see the red, wherever you're seeing like that red glow around, that's that video footage that I was telling you that was just like amazing to me. Because we always, when we had the crew capsules coming in, the part of the mission that always makes my heart stop is there's a blackout period where you don't have calm during that phase and you lose contact with the crew members and you always are like holding your breath until you
get to the other end. And so to be able to have calm through that period as as were working re entry to me, it would mean that maybe I wouldn't have to. I'd always feel like I held my breath for like 3 minutes. So I'm looking forward to the Starship Re entries because it'll when we eventually few more years, but eventually we'd be like people after we really gained the reliability data we
need to have for the star shows. But it's going to be awesome because we won't have those big blackout periods with the with the Starman com. So that was the video of our third integrated test that we had in March. You know, like I'd already talked about, we were able to add reliability upgrades. We're always learning and updating the vehicles as we're flying.
Once again, it's really nice. You can always see when all the booster or when all the engines are working, it's a nice 33 all lit up at the back end and able to see how things are working. The other nice thing when you watch a video and you see it taken off the pad, there's always this concentric when the engines all work together and and they're really working efficiently you can kind of see the flame kind of come together and push up and that's that's when you have a really nice
integrated propulsion burn. So as a as an old propulsion engineer I that that's always one of my favorite parts of seeing the that booster piece. So as you guys are looking at future flight test missions, really appreciate how those engines work together. We made it through boost back. If you notice that you saw a little bit of the videos that was coming in and we really began to see how we can work the GNC learning, how does the the booster operate coming back.
So we got some initial data on and and we're rolling in changes to our GNC design for this next mission see if we can get it a little bit farther And then first time that we ever started working through the Starship reentry phases. And so and I've talked about the live video over and over because I that's the first time ever everybody that saw that today, that's the first time that we've anybody in the world's been able to see footage like that. So more to come nowhere right
now the vehicle's ready. If you go out to the pad now we've got a a Starship and a booster sitting there. We're getting ready to do our integrated wet dress. We call it our wet dress to make sure that we can flow off propellants everything you know, you want to make sure you've got all the kinks out. We've tested both of these sections already, but now we are going to do an integrated test and we'll be looking at doing that in the next week.
You know these are test flights. But it has been so much fun to me like we talked about at the beginning. For me to be able to experience with the team all their dedication hard work as we continue to learn and take each and and be able to build out each of the phases that we need to to be able to conduct their long term lunar. And really Elon's whole vision of making us an interplanetary species and being able to eventually go to Mars.
So one day I'm not sure when somebody I was gonna doing a speech and they were like tell me when we're gonna go to Mars. And it's like we got a lot of learning to do before we go to Mars. But I do know, I do know that one day out of the Rio Grande Valley, there will be the Starship going to Mars. Thank you. You got some questions, but I'm not sure who's going to pull out to see it or I could take questions, however.
Go ahead. What do y'all have set up for lightning protection because that is so high? Yeah, we do. We have towers, but we also have our on site. We have two on site meter all of this too. But you always have to have lightning towers, yeah, to be able to do that. So we do watch the weather we like we have folks that are always constantly watching the weather because not only that but if you know we're we're by a big body of water.
We've got pads we've got outside areas we've got the hangar, we're always moving people around. So it's also just from an overall safety perspective that we're we we have a bunch of tall structures on a very, very flat area. So we gotta make sure we got lighting protection on actually all of our buildings. Are you guys planning on buying any more beach in Poca Chico?
We are pretty much limited by that the beach area, I mean because of the Texas Parks area that's there we there, there are small areas but they're they're not really great to be building on. One of the great things if you look at all the big major ranges that are out there, they are in the middle of wildlife regions because guess what if you didn't have a wildlife region you probably won't have a bunch of
open land. So it is definitely a there's only a limited amount of commercial land that's there, but it is nice to be in the wildlife reserve because it would not be good for us if people are building you know complexes around there. So first commercial spaceport.
So one of the challenges we have typically space boards are federally mandated and so we have to obviously be working with the federal government, state, Cameron County and for us to be able to as as a commercial orbital space board figure out how do you coexist with all the other activities that need to happen and keep people safe. Can you talk a little bit about Booster 11 testing just recently and the other starships that you
have in mind? Seems like Starship 30 and 31 are being tested at the same time, prepping for the next flight and when the next flight. Yeah. So we the, I mean the vehicles are out, the vehicles that we're going to be flying for our next mission are out on the pad getting ready, waiting for a wet dress. We were testing our next round of of vehicles, next round of * shifts and we had a test anomaly that we're assessing right now and understanding what does that mean.
We're kind of holding off on our wet dress because one of the things you do, you know, we're always working on vehicles, but when there's a problem on a vehicle that's in the blow, you want to make sure that you can separate the cause of that problem from your flight vehicle. And So what the teams are doing right now is really going and saying, is it the same design exactly?
Is there some other reason for us to have separation to make sure that we're not going into a flight test with there being an issue? I think right now they're working through that and we'll probably have the vehicle cleared. We're still working on licensing with FA. They're going through a few less crossing their T's, dotting their IS.
We're hoping to have the license by the end of May, early June time frame and we're we're going to be ready like like always we're going to have the vehicle stacked and the first day we get that license we're going to fly on one of your last slides. You've talked about it, the noise dampening and I. Have a friend that lives close. To the tag and they said that they didn't notice the rocket had even launched.
Is that because of that? Well, I think we said a different it it we we are managing things, but I also think like One Direction makes a big difference. You know I noticed you know Lyssol and I kind of monitor like the interaction. And one of the things we're really working on is how do how do we make sure that the area that maybe isn't used to orbital launches understands kind of what's a feasible environment and what's not a feasible
environment. You know with rockets launching and going up you get the the loud it's it's noise, but it's it's a it's that it's a vibration of the air kind of moving out. It's not in the ground. So one of the things we have to educate people on is this is not gonna hurt your foundation. It's not gonna hurt. You know it's not your. We're not we're not doing something in the ground which is kind of going to be permeating.
It's actually moving, you know through the air and you're getting vibrations through the air what does impact it a lot. And we we do a lot of monitoring in fact we have monitoring on the old White House, we have monitoring in South Padre, we have monitoring all around because per our SP licensing we have to show that we're able to keep within our licensing requirements for impacts. And so far everything is within
those those limits. In fact, we fight in a little bit conservative in certain areas, which is makes sense because when you haven't flown, you add more margin to your calculations, but wind direction changes a lot. I I lived in Florida outside Kennedy Space Center, some launches you wouldn't even know they went up and some launches depending on the wind direction, it would be like rapping in the
windows, right. So I do think there was a difference in wind direction between the second launch where we heard a lot of people from Brownsville were like man, that was loud. And then the third launch, everybody was like that wasn't very loud, you know, So I I I think wind direction does help, but we also have to stay within
limits on wind direction. Like there's all these conditions that we work with the with the FAA on that drive bus, like our launch conditions that we have to stay within. Yeah, being one of the most innovative companies in our region and offering the most exciting opportunities here for our community and students. Do you foresee a time when tours for the public may be available again or perhaps the visitor
center? Yes. So I think you know right now like I talked about we've just got a ton of construction going on. I mean we are we're we're we're struggling with how do we have walk paths for our employees. Like we have all these like we're always having to rework our walk path.
So right now we've kind of held off on doing tours just because I, you know, I'm everyday working to keep people safe on site and just with all the construction going on, just don't want a bunch of people that don't have to be exposed to that on site. But we one of our licensing requirements is actually to give tours to students and educational areas and be able to have people benefit from STEM
interaction. So we are when we get the million square foot factory down, when we're kind of have don't have cement trucks going down Hwy. 4 and working through it. When we get the road a little bit better. I mean, we're working very hard with Tech Stop because I don't know if you guys have been on Hwy. 4, but I'm pretty horrified sometimes that we've got the people, my our all these employees, our children and their school buses going down that road.
So when we get those conditions better than absolutely we're going to be working towards that. I do think we're going to have another educational day in October and we're hoping that things will be a little bit less crazy then and looking forward to having a large group of
children out again. We did just sponsor in April 2, supported the big beach cleanup, which is also kind of fun and we always have a free lunch that everybody can go get up by the restaurant and kind of enjoy the area for that too. So we're trying to figure out other ways to get it done with that, but yet not adding to any additional exposure for people like a timeline. For Star Factory, just like 20252026, it's always. We've got to go back here.
So no, I think we're shooting for a star factory. We're in the last phase right now for it to be done by the end of the year. Yeah, Brownsville seems to be. The tip of the sphere for developmental launches and even Elon was quoted last month saying something like that was two towers for Florida for the operational side. The last thing that you said here, where we fly tomorrow, here is encouragement and you. See that happening?
For will we be always the testing facility for we need to talk to Florida and then they well. Well, all I, we need two launch areas to be able to meet our manifest for us to be able to do that. So just a single landing requires 15 tanker launches, OK.
So you can so and they need to be done within a certain period of time and so one of the reasons why this is gonna be our our workforce area and but we will also need the Florida phase two to be able to do the the number and the sequencing of the missions. But if you're really colonizing Mars, you need a craft photo missions to be able to do that.
And so I actually feel like they're we're trying to figure out how to do the mix and but we really want to keep this ability to be able to make changes and test and be able to roll those changes into a vehicle and and have that be out of our star based facility with crude launches. You may not be able to have all of the changes and the structure may be a little bit, but but for some of our tanker missions and everything else, we really want to be gaining that efficiency,
right. And so we're still working through this, but I think what's really cool is that we know Starbase is going to be the home of Starship. Yeah, sorry. OK. So I have. I have. A22 part question What are some of the challenges or attractions facing the facility and employees when it comes over the housing and quality of life projects may attract culture, current future future employees in the area and how that may or
may not affect the operations. Well, I I think one of the main challenges that I talked to you already is just getting the infrastructure, if you realize all the infrastructure that's need just getting down Hwy. 4, right? I mean there's really understanding when you think about the the the number of new companies that the forecast coming into it at Brownsville and then the fact that we have you know over 3000 people coming down Hwy. 4 and you look at the
infrastructure that's there. The there's a very critical need for just being able to look at how flow and how just basic supplies are flowing through that east side of Brownsville there. And with supplies also coming in from the port. So you know it's it's tough to be able to sit down and say how do you plan for a major economic growth area on this east side of town that really hasn't seen that and but it's right now it's a critical phase for us
especially ABS. We're also clearing up for the port to be gaining a lot of that Houston port traffic to and obviously we're working these baseless are working with next decade the port and other people on like what are the infrastructure projects that we need investment from the state and federal level to be able to support in that area. But also getting everybody else to be thinking about even a a small thing like timing of the lights.
I know the city of Brownsville has been working how to time the lights to be able to handle traffic flow. There's also just a basic issue of how do we get people to invest in hotels, restaurants, infrastructure on that east side of town too to be able to and that we have to continue to work with them with local providers on does. Is there a business case for that on that side?
But if you look at just the amount like this, what we lose and people driving through Brownsville, most of the hotels are off 69 being able to come down and and be able to have access to Starbase, You know we're always like how do you get people on site even quicker and that's also another area like how do we be able to create infrastructure there that can support the business community that's not going on that site now. So a lot of individuals that.
Are here are business owners themselves? How can they learn about potential opportunities that might exist with the SpaceX? So I think that the big thing is to obviously money sells here because if that there's questions or things that you have, please reach out to her. We are looking at different kinds of open houses that may be helpful for different suppliers, you know, she works with or Nicholas Ramirez or is our local supply folks.
We're always looking for new contractors, new capabilities that may be there to be able to put on different projects that we have, but also let us know too how we can be helping out. One of the things that Michel and I've been working on is how to get people out into the community. I appreciated when the mayor was talking about how far how many of our folks live here. One of the reasons I'm here is because we have a large population of folks that are
living in this area. And so one of the big goals that we've been having is how do we get people that are newly here out in the community at different restaurants, at different activities, at different local family community areas to be able to get them familiar too with the the attractions and activities that are out here.
So if you've got things that you think would be a cool, you know, activity for us to do, we've done Taco tours, wine tours, beer tours, We got an El Paso Ranch event coming up with obviously the Gladys Porter Zoos like an annual family event for us. We've you know rented out the water at the Sturtevant Water park after.
I mean there's. So we do want to figure out ways to be able to get our folks also invested in the community, because once we know, once they start putting their roots down, then that's how we keep our best talent. Do you have any plans to? Put in a tunnel of a bridge, a ferry system or anything to connect Boca Chica back to like 100. We have looked at ways. I mean right now what we invested in is a hovercraft system that takes our employees back and forth.
But that is a well we looked at the cost of it. It's a huge infrastructure cost. It's probably you know over 150, close to $200 million. So we, we haven't invested in
that yet. I mean right now like I said, we've been investing in getting the factory going, getting the additional had built, which is also you know all of those are huge investments for us. And then working on how do we start building up and partnering with the state and federal levels on these infrastructure pieces that we need to be able to have in place for us to be able to conduct business long term at the end of Hwy. 4. Thanks again for having me.
I really, really appreciate your time and thank you again for the warm up. Or you step down. I'd like to invite our mayor as well as an ABC Board president have yet to be on to join me up on the stage. Got a small token of appreciation, happy that presented to her on behalf of the ADC as well as the City of Pilots Little Bird Mullet that was very fond of chocolates, so we made sure. Basket. For her Harlem. Keeper Suites. Awesome. Thank you so much.
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