RIO GRANDE VALLEY — It’s hard to imagine that the pile of sand and earth being compacted near the southernmost tip of Texas will soon launch Elon Musk’s dreams one rocket at a time into space.

That is where SpaceX is building the company’s first commercial launch pad — the SpaceX South Texas Launch Site — near Boca Chica Beach just a few miles north of the Mexican border in the Rio Grande Valley.

The company remains on track to open for commercial rocket launching as early as next year — even after one of his rockets blew up on the launchpad last fall. The Sept. 1 explosion destroyed the $60 million rocket and a $200 million Israeli satellite.

SpaceX said a complex chain reaction caused by frozen liquid oxygen reacting to something in the fuel tank made the rocket explode. Musk said the problem was fixed, and SpaceX successfully returned to flight on Jan. 14.

Potential hiccups

The launch pad explosion showed the potential hiccups that the fledgling private commercial space industry faces as it pushes the bounds of engineering and physics. But the work in South Texas continues unabated, and is part of a larger space industry that already is established in the border region.

Musk’s new launch pad, along with other companies in the race to commercialize space, are feeding a growing workforce and research hub exploring the universe that’s emerging in the Rio Grande Valley.

A joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin called United Launch Alliance — Musk’s main competitor — has about 160 employees tucked inside a nondescript hangar at Harlingen’s Valley International Airport about 47 miles northwest of the SpaceX launch site where ULA quietly has been assembling nose cones for Atlas V rockets over the past 30 years.

Local leaders are hoping that SpaceX’s new complex and ULA’s facility will help create a high-tech renaissance in the Rio Grande Valley, where agriculture and staid manufacturers drive the economy.

Building under the radar

On the southern edge of Valley International Airport, a massive 300,000-square-foot white building is marked by a single sign that says “ULA America’s Ride to Space.” Inside, dozens of workers are assembling rocket pieces destined for a one-way trip to space. The facility in Harlingen has been on the same site since 1987 assembling Atlas payload fairing components — the nose cones used to protect spacecraft.

“Eighty percent of what my folks do is load parts, drill holes and put in fasteners,” said Tim Piller, the senior manufacturing manager in Harlingen who has been at the facility for 14 years.

A tour of the facility showed men and women doing just that. The payload fairings — as large as 14 feet in diameter — are loaded onto mounts where workers drilled holes, placed fasteners and pinched them together. Some fairings can be wider, depending on the rocket’s payload.

Rocket assembly

The facility also assembles the adapters that connect the first and second stages of the rocket to each other and are designed to break apart at the right moment when the first stage has run out of fuel.

The Harlingen facility works with ULA’s Decatur, Alabama, manufacturing plant, which Piller said has roughly 800 employees and 1.25 million-square-feet under roof.

“They have a much more robust capability manufacturingwise versus what we do,” Piller said. “We do structural assembly. They do everything from machining to welding to harness fabrication to pressure type test.”

The nose cones built in Harlingen go either to Decatur or directly to one of two launch pads that ULA operates: one located in the Cape Canaveral complex in Florida, the other at Vandenberg AFB on the southern coast of California. The Harlingen-assembled parts are transported to Florida by truck and to California by boat through the Panama Canal.

Saving money

The distance to Harlingen — which is roughly 1,000 miles from Decatur, 1,300 miles from Cape Canaveral, and 1,700 miles to Vandenberg — may seem prohibitive, but Piller says that the location gives the facility an edge on labor costs.

“It’s not a secret that the reason that companies come to South Texas is labor costs less than it does in other parts in the country, there’s no doubt about it,” Piller said. “That’s why we still exist because we can fabricate cheaper than they can in Decatur or any other part in the country.”

Neither Piller nor Lyn Chassagne — a ULA spokeswoman — would say how much the Harlingen employees are paid, but employee-posted salaries on the job review site Glassdoor showed that most employees at ULA make more than $80,000 a year.

Cheap labor

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that in May 2015, people working in the Brownsville-Harlingen metropolitan area made a mean hourly wage of $16.21 an hour — or a little more than $33,000 a year.

Every occupation except health care practitioners and technical categories made less in Brownsville-Harlingen than their national counterparts. Mathmaticians and computer programmers make 34 percent below the national average while architects and engineers earn 20 percent below average U.S. incomes, according to federal wage data.

Without SpaceX, “we’ll go back to what we had which is what we still have right now which is manufacturing, logistics and distribution,” said Gilberto Salinas, executive vice president of the Brownsville Economic Development Corp.

But right now, it’s “an open canvas,” he said. “We get to create this sector, a niche for ourselves from scratch, which hardly happens.”

Expensive rocket science

Launching satellites into space is an expensive business, and cutting on costs when possible is paramount to commercial space companies such as SpaceX. It costs Musk roughly $62 million to send one of his Falcon 9 rockets into space. Chassagne said a base-level Atlas V rocket without additional boosters costs $160 million.

The ULA’s two rockets — the Atlas V and the Delta IV — have multiple variants that use the same central core with different payload fairings and rocket booster layouts. SpaceX currently operates the Falcon 9 and is developing the Falcon Heavy, a modified version of the Falcon 9 that would compete directly with the Delta IV and the Vulcan, ULA’s next generation rocket set to launch in 2019.

The Vulcan will replace the Delta IV and, eventually, the Atlas V.

Work for ‘years to come’

ULA Chief Executive Officer Tory Bruno said in a phone interview that the Vulcan will eventually cost less than $100 million to fly. The Harlingen facility will still have work for years to come even after the Atlas V is phased out because there will be a “long overlap” in use for years after the Vulcan is introduced.

Harlingen — which assembles the aluminum Atlas V payload fairing — won’t assemble the Vulcan’s composite fairing, a job that will go to ULA partner RUAG in Decatur. But other aluminum structures assembled in Harlingen — the first- and second-stage adapters, among others — may continue to be made in South Texas once the Atlas V is retired.

“We have not made a final design and therefore a final decision on where they’ll be manufactured,” Bruno said of the adapters. “The metallic structures that are similar to what’s on Atlas will very likely end up right back in Harlingen.”

Building the future

At Musk’s launch pad, on the last curve in Boca Chica Boulevard before the road ends on the sandy strip of beach and the Gulf of Mexico, a tall mound of dirt stands surrounded by chain-link fencing and sandy dunes. Approaching the end of the road, offshore oil rigs can be seen dotting the Gulf’s horizon while birds rest at the edge of the water.

The launch pad was brought to Boca Chica about two years ago with at least $13 million in incentives from the Texas Spaceport Trust Fund to the Cameron County Spaceport Development Corp. to build the infrastructure, according to Sam Taylor, deputy press secretary for the Texas governor’s office.

Another $2.3 million was provided through a grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund.

SpaceX has committed to eventually hire 300 employees in the local area, and expects the Boca Chica launch site to be finished in 2017 for launches in 2018, said SpaceX spokesman John Taylor.

SpaceX has installed one of two ground station antennas at the site, said James Gleeson, another company spokesman. They will be used to track manned flights flown by SpaceX to the International Space Station, which are scheduled to launch in 2018.

STARGATE

For now, local groups along the Interstate 69 East corridor are working to take advantage of having one of the leading space companies in the world move to their backyard.

At one of the University of Texas’ new campuses — the UT Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville — Dr. Frederick Jenet is pushing ahead with the school’s STARGATE program, a collaboration with SpaceX to expose students to the company’s space program.

STARGATE will have a facility next to the SpaceX integration facility in Boca Chica, giving students and professors a unique ability to interact with and view SpaceX’s missions.

UT Rio Grande Valley associate professor of physics Volker Quetschke said that the September explosion was “progress” because “if it’s unchanged, it’s proven engineering that’s 100 years old, (then) we would all drive around in horse buggies using steam engines.” It won’t have much impact on STARGATE, he said.

“Sure, companies rise and fall and the whole STARGATE thing came out of SpaceX, but that’s not the only avenue,” Quetschke said. The university program is talking with other companies and pursuing other areas of research, he said.

The program is being supported by a $4.4 million grant from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund matched by $4.6 million from the University of Texas System.

Jenet is a California Institute of Technology-trained associate professor of physics who started working at UT Brownsville in 2005, long before it combined in mid-2015 with UT Pan American to form the new UT Rio Grande Valley.

Space discoveries

The school’s main initiative for a decade has been its Arecibo Remote Control Center, or ARCC, which takes data from the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center’s Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico and has students sift through it to find radio pulsars and other exotic galactic bodies.

To date, at least 63 discoveries have been made at ARCC, including the 10th known double-neutron star system.

Jenet said that students from his program are the ones who led the charge to engage SpaceX and persuade them to partner with local educational institutions.

“We basically have these programs that were developed, we have these students that were at this level and then SpaceX comes nosing around. Our students immediately take advantage of this and they start organizing themselves to talk to SpaceX and organizing themselves to talk at the forums,” he said.

Part of the practical use of STARGATE will be developing new radio frequency communications to increase the bandwidth of information that can be sent to and from space.

“At the end of the day it’s the same bag of tools that you learn to get a radio telescope to work, function and detect astronomical objects, it’s the same kind of stuff that you learn that ultimately can be used to get a rocket to launch, to track it, to communicate with it,” Jenet said.

Brain drain

Residents also talked about reversing the “brain drain” that occurs on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Alma Guerrero-Miller, assistant director for special projects at UT Rio Grande Valley, said that states on both sides complain that “their most talented people … will not stay on the border.”

“Our best people were leaving,” she said.

Flanked by computer monitors in the center of ARCC’s circular desks, Andrew Danford, a 24-year-old senior physics major from Brownsville, said the mentality in high school was to “leave.”

“There really isn’t anything to pursue down here,” he said. “And now there is something to pursue down here, there is something I can see.”

Giving the local population more avenues to stay is what Salinas of the Brownsville Economic Development Corp. hopes SpaceX and others will bring. He was one of the people who worked to bring SpaceX to the area.

He said that many locals are in more “traditional” lines of work, such as manufacturing for the automotive sector. Because of that, he and his fellow economic developers had to do more than think outside of the box.

Totally new

“We really had to … create boxes outside of that box simply because it’s a totally new industry for us,” he said.

Salinas hopes that SpaceX’s involvement in the area will bring some types of aerospace manufacturing, whether partial or whole, to the Rio Grande Valley. He said that Brownsville has already seen enhanced name recognition with heavy manufacturers and the “Big 3” automakers — Ford, General Motors and Fiat-Chrysler.

Back in Harlingen, 34-year-old Rita Gonzalez has made her career in space as a structural assembler for ULA. Gonzalez, who has an associate degree in collision repair from Texas State Technical College in Harlingen, said she initially didn’t know what ULA did.

“When I came for my interview and they brought me to see and to walk through and everything I was just amazed … it was like it was hidden from me,” she said.

New companies

Gonzalez and other team members were conducting final inspections on fairing parts being prepped for delivery. When Gonzalez is not in the clean room doing inspections, she is out on the floor riveting.

When asked what opportunities there were before she joined ULA, Gonzalez replied, “Here in the Valley? Not very many.”

Back at UT Rio Grande Valley, students such as Louis Dartez, a 25-year-old graduate student from Brownsville and Port Isabel, are starting to open their own doors. Dartez is the chief operations officer for SG Surveillance, a surveillance startup and the first to come out of the STARGATE program in South Texas.

Dartez’s company hopes to create a ground-based platform to allow people to conduct remote surveillance and analysis of large sites — something he believes SpaceX could be interested in using.

Physics professor Quetschke said: “After years of stagnation, I feel an excitement in the community that stuff is going on.”

rdruzin@express-news.net

@druz_journo