groundbreaking

Groundbreaking took place at Boca Chica Beach in South Texas on Sept. 22, 2014 with CEO Elon Musk.

“It very well could be the first person to go to another planet could launch from this location,” Musk said. “This is really going to be a new kind of spaceport that is optimized for commercial operations. Cape Canaveral and Cape Vandenberg are great launch sites, but they are military launch sites. … What’s important for the future of space exploration is to have a truly commercial launch site, just as we have commercial airports.”

Musk's personal goal is to land humans on Mars, "humanity's survival will be tied in part to being a multi-planetary species"

Construction has already started at the launch control center, and the first space launch is expected in late 2016.

"There will be some advance preparation work here in Boca Chica, but we’ll probably start more significant activity in the third quarter of next year,” as SpaceX is focused on refurbishing Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida “Once we are finished with the upgrades on Pad 39A, we’re going to take our development team and move them to Boca Chica and work on the launch site here,” he said.

“I'm an optimist,” Musk said. “I wouldn't have gotten into the rocket business otherwise.”

“We expect to spend on the order of about $100 million” during the next three to four years to build the site

Phase 1 will see the first launches from the third quarter of 2016

SpaceX would like to move launches of commercial geostationary orbit satellites here as soon as the facility is ready in order to take advantage of the slightly favourable latitude of the Texas site over KSC.

KSC will still be used for government launches, including commercial crew missions to the international space station under a contract the company won from NASA Sept. 16.

“I would expect commercial astronauts, private astronauts, to be departing from South Texas,”