My Summer Lair Chapter #323:How Much Space Does Space Need?
Welcome to Boca Chica, Texas. This is where Elon Musk has built his SpaceX launchpad. Boca Chica is a vivid mosaic of the romance and the hazards of space exploration. Or rather was.
The unincorporated community of Boca Chica Village, located in southern Texas, was renamed Starbase on May 3, 2025, becoming a newly incorporated city.
Mars has captivated our imaginations for centuries. We speculate about intelligent life…out there. More recently, NASA and the JPL have been sending robots to Mars to analyze soil and to probe for water. Maybe even discover Marvin the Martian. (Bugs Bunny would hate that so much.)
This is the reality of going to Mars: to colonize Mars we’re gonna hafta colonize Earth.
SpaceX looks to increase the number of launches at its Texas site from five to 25 per year. That means Starbase, Texas is going to become a SpaceX campus. SpaceX has been buying land in the area and homes for company housing and SpaceX facilities have sprouted up. They gotta design the rockets, then build the rockets, then launch the rockets and then return the rockets.
This isn’t a car factory in Detroit; this is a much bigger, more ambitious scheme.
To understand the scope of this impressive aspiration, director Julien Élie began documenting the various perspectives and experiences. The result is a documentary called Shifting Baselines.
What’s fantastic about Shifting Baselines is that it’s not necessarily a damning documentary. If you’ve been on social media the last couple of years you know how lazy people get criticizing Elon Musk. That gets so boring so quickly.
Gently, the documentary traces the legitimate environmental concerns with these SpaceX launches. You see farmers struggling with debris from failed rocket launches. Shifting Baselines injects the audience into the area letting the ambient sounds––all the nature speak. And sometimes as the environment shifts, there’s a distinct silence. What’s going on with all the nature? I dig his use of ambient and natural sounds.
Shifting Baselines also captures the public enthusiasm for Mars. In this My Summer Lair conversation I refer to these characters as space hippies who are spellbound by rocket launches. You know how NFL games have tailgate parties in the stadium’s parking lots? Picture that only for rocket launches. There’s no facing painting, though. These Mars tailgaters are rooting humans can reach Mars. Or the Moon.
(Truly, a rocket launch is captivating. It’s the impressive culmination of human curiosity combined with scientific endeavour. It’s one of the coolest things humans do. To defy gravity? That’s boldly impressive.)
I enjoyed this conversation with the French director, based in Montreal, trying to grapple with these elements. I find the idea of going to Mars to be inspiring, however the reality of going to Mars is Facebook complicated.
Oh and yes, because we’re going to space this MSL conversation closes with a simple yet profound question. I asked Julien Élie…is there anything out there?
Shifting Baselines @ W • T • F
Host Sammy Younan
Recorded: Tuesday, May 20, 2025 at 12:00 pm (EST)
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