I'm John Batchel with the author Eric Berger. Reentry is the book, highly recommended to get to you where we are right now, which is waiting for more tests of starship than super heavy. However, they're testing them in a place called Boca Chica. Where is that?

Boca Chica is the southern end of Texas.

If you drive down along the Texas coast, past Corpus Christi, past the ranch lands, and all the way down the Rio Grande River, it's right at the southern tip of the Texas boot.

I love the way they build Bocahaca.

You have a man who's sent out there to shift, what is it, 600 tons of dirt or something,

that they drop into a swamp to give it a pad.

I didn't know that there was swamp underneath the launch tower.

Well, there used to be.

They dropped dirt in there, and it was too expensive to have a private company come and haul the dirt away so they rented a bunch of backloaders and did it themselves that's that's

SpaceX for you but then they need a facility to build starships and super heavies so musk says well

this is what I want.

And they put up three tents, 400 by 110, and start building.

That's what's out there now.

This ability to manufacture equipment overnight at the place of origin.

And must saw this in one sweep is the way you tell the story.

Yeah, he saw this in one sweep about five years ago,

and they built those first giant tents,

and then months and months later,

they realized that the tents weren't big enough,

and so they built permanent facilities and larger tents, then they built big massive integration towers.

And so it's just, it's, Starship has evolved, or Starbase, excuse me, that this facility

in Boca, Chica, Texas has evolved over time from very modest beginnings to almost like a,

...