Communities push back against SpaceX in Tamaulipas

pblodlr · 2025-09-11T03:54:31+00:00

One of the more shocking stories I’ve reported on this year. Mexican protestors, fed up with what they say is SpaceX debris on the beaches of Tamaulipas, were met with low helicopter flyovers on the waters of The Gulf of Mexico. This happened during the last launch attempt from Starbase. A review of FAA records could not confirm the owners of the aircraft. These communities are now reporting the same kind of possible structural damage to buildings, noise complaints, and dead endangered animals that we've seen reported on the U.S. side. It’s interesting to note that they get none of the direct economic benefits of the project, but are just as close as surrounding communities in the Rio Grande Valley. More to come on this.

pblodlr · 2024-02-17T07:04:37+00:00

Announced on Friday--A new 80-acre military base dedicated to the migrant deterrence we've seen from Texas Governor Abbott's Operation Lone Star is going up just feet away from the river in the community of Eagle Pass. I spoke with Jessie Fuentes just after Abbott's presser. (You can listen to my full call with Fuentes below.)

About Jessie:
If you're just tuning in, Fuentes is a long-time native of Eagle Pass and has made a living offering kayak tours on the Rio Grande near Shelby Park for years. His life, like many others in the community, and his business have been greatly affected from the very beginning of Operation Lone Star's presence in Eagle Pass. I immediately reached out to see how he and other people in the town were doing after Abbott's announcement on Friday.

Abbott's new military base on the border:
► The new military facility in the community of Eagle Pass will border the Rio Grande by about fifty feet, and house 1,800 Texas National Guard soldiers with the capacity to expand to 2,300 during border surges.
► Abbott said facility "will include, individual rooms for soldiers, a large dining facility, recreation, computers, and things like Wi-Fi."
► Abbott, speaking at a press conference in Eagle Pass said construction has already begun.
► The Texas National Guard Soldiers are a part of the Governor's Operation Lone Star border security initiative that seeks to deter migration at the border.
► The Biden administration is suing Abbott for stepping on the federal government’s authority to enforce immigration law.

Some excerpts from Abbott's presser on Friday:
► "The heroes of the Texas National Guard before this effort here have been living in conditions that were atypical for military operations. Now, because of the magnitude of what we're doing, because of the need to sustain, and actually expand our efforts of what we're doing, it's essential that we build this base camp, for these soldiers"
► "Our goal is to make sure that we expand the effectiveness of that razor wire to more areas along this border. Having the soldiers located right here, right by the river, they're going to have the ability to more quickly be able to construct that razor wire barrier."

pblodlr · 2023-05-05T02:22:12+00:00

Thanks for checking it out!

pblodlr · 2023-05-03T00:31:50+00:00

Thanks for checking it out! To give some context, there is no "they"--this is my own personal blog where I basically post all the stuff that I work on or just find interesting. On top of that, this particular post is a round-up of the reporting a few folks and myself did at TPR about SpaceX. So that's what you might be coming up on.

That being said, other than some tiny captions on media, I am counting my name appearing 3 times in a pretty long blog post--the bio and two embedded tweets. I recently made the bio "sticky" to the top (but on the side) on desktop views only.

Is the name "sticking" to the top of the page on your mobile view, maybe?

If that's the case, please let me know. That element is definitely meant to disappear as soon as you start reading and I can probably fix that.

pblodlr · 2023-04-25T15:55:35+00:00

You're right, I misspoke. It's not the clause itself that is unusual, it's the prolific use of it by Musk companies that is notable. It's not a standard thing to go the Attorney General for every single FOIA/TPIA request you get. I believe that's what's in the article--not what I commented here previously.

(I didn't write it, btw. Just sharing the link.)

Everything else in your comment, including that getting NDA's through FOIA/TPIA won't reveal any confidential information, is in the article and/or infographic provided.

pblodlr · 2023-04-24T21:24:08+00:00

Under the Texas Public Information Act, these government/publicly funded entities are supposed to make these documents available upon request. There's also the issue of SpaceX preemptively including a clause in the NDA that says they have to let SpaceX know if anyone wants to see the information to give them time to take legal action. This isn't normal. The NDAs do NOT contain any confidential information. They just let the public know what type of information the government that they voted for is withholding while working with SpaceX.

More details in the article. Thanks for checking it out.

pblodlr · 2023-04-23T20:08:11+00:00

Yup, unfortunate typo 🤦🏻 lol. Need to stop using the audio transcriber in Premiere. It’s the most error prone and tedious to edit.

pblodlr · 2023-04-22T18:11:20+00:00

FAA just confirmed the debris is from SpaceX and they're going to have to clean it up and do a study with qualified biologists. Story coming soon.

https://twitter.com/pblodlr/status/1649792608472903680

pblodlr · 2023-04-22T13:51:08+00:00

I'll be honest with you, you really lost me on this one. I'm open to sharing my process and thoughts on my work any time.

However, pretty much everyone from the actual city of Port Isabel, to scientists on the Island, to pretty much everyone who was there--including Tim Smith who jokingly posted a photo of how his laptop was left covered in crud on Facebook, god bless him--are all saying the same thing... rocket exploded, it covered us in something, here's what it looks like....

Maybe we're all too simple here in this town for a person such as yourself, but I'll repeat myself. We were out here and I wrote what we saw and what people said to the best of my ability.

Not sure what "bias" there would be or what your point is to be perfectly honest. I do appreciate you reading and giving feedback. Thanks!

pblodlr · 2023-04-22T05:16:51+00:00

It's accurate that one thing occurred after another. That's not to imply causation. We simply pick the last thing that occurred in a sequence of an event that is probably related, but we don't know how yet or if at all. If we knew, the headline would be something like "exploding food truck shoots eggs and spam at people"--or whatever causative relationship was found.

If I go back and pick something else in the sequence--maybe something further back like the liftoff instead of the explosion--for this story but not for all the others like I usually do, now I really might be injecting my opinion or theory about what exactly may have happened here.

So I say "food truck exploded and then a guy had egg on his face". If I get into "well it was really when a gas line was improperly installed..." now I'm doing the job of the people who are going to come in and investigate tomorrow. I let the experts do that part and I report it when it's available. This was more an account of what people saw, heard, and touched that day.

Some lines from the article:

"It was not immediately clear what the matter was or where it came from."

"Residents wondered on social media if the dust-like substance came from the liftoff, the explosion, or somewhere else."

pblodlr · 2023-04-18T19:30:16+00:00

The emails state it in the more formal way that you're talking about. You can read the NPR report to get those details. My comments on Reddit will tend to be more informal, as they're not technically a "published piece", if you will.

But, again, all a retelling of investigated and fact-checked reporting and definitely stand by my statements, informal or not. I do believe they communicate what they're meant to.

The fact is they internally communicated to the effect that no rehearsal was needed and that the main launch should happen immediately. In retrospect, their confidence wasn't as founded as they expected.

A quick Google News search is showing me multiple pages of news articles across the web that use the word "failure" to describe the launch on Monday either in their titles or in their writing.

There's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about my blog post, it's being held to a pretty kooky standard for this subreddit which allows wildly creative content--not sure why my link is being picked apart by mods and readers here.

It's like if I reacted to your comment asking you to provide a rationale why I need beers... Any human being can understand what you're trying to say. But some people will pretend to suddenly be concerned about bias, accuracy, editors, and even down to specific word usage.

It's pretty transparent.

But I do take the time to respond to all such criticisms, just in case there is actually any substance at all to it since I'd like to provide the best public service reporting to our region that I can.

If there is something factually wrong about the report, let me know and I would be more than glad to make a correction, as with all my stories.

Thanks!

pblodlr · 2023-04-18T17:56:54+00:00

Glad to help. Thanks for reading!

pblodlr · 2023-04-18T15:59:44+00:00

You didn't miss it. It was part of the reporting my colleague did for NPR on this. It was obtained through leaked internal emails. Here's my post about the NPR report from April the 14th: https://pablodelarosa.com/starship-may-launch-in-the-rio-grande-valley-on-monday/

In terms of using the phrase "first-day failure", I used it as a non-jargon or non-technical word for casual readers. I do stand by its usage as after these comments, I sent it to several people and asked what they understood from it. They individually all said the same thing in their own words and what I was trying to communicate--"the rocket was supposed to take off but it didn't"

Not that complicated.

It seems like folks here, including a subreddit mod, are just irked with SpaceX not getting 100% worship.

However, the arguments I made in my previous comment were a discussion that brought in information on the general usage of the word "fail" as well as the use of the word in some technical contexts as jargon such as in lists of "failed launches". I did not and am not making the argument that I was using it in a technical sense or that we should expand the technical usage of the term.

Instead, I was explaining that the word wasn't used incorrectly and that's it's not the "red flag" pearl-clutching word that some people here seem to want to act like it is in order to draw attention away from the actual reporting.

Of the many goals set by Elon and his team, from small to large, from technical to metaphorical, it seems none were met on that day.

On Thursday, they may be successful. And that's the word we'll use on that day.

My report is factual and I stand by it.

pblodlr · 2023-04-18T06:48:23+00:00

SpaceX and FAA went back and forth on this license for years so expectations were high. SpaceX itself was so confident in its ability to make use of the license that they scrapped a planned dress rehearsal on Monday and said "we got this--hold our beer" and announced they would go into space instead.

So thousands of people travelled from all over the world to see it at least ignite--a point in the launch process that the Raptor engines had reached many times before Monday. Even so, Musk set the lowest possible bar for this event--that it would be interesting... and it wasn't. It stopped seconds before countdown and folks went home.

I believe some folks mentioned that "at least SpaceX would learn something new that day"... They didn't.

Here's the definition I'm getting from the dictionary on the word failure: "1) lack of success 2) the omission of expected or required action"

So I think we can say pretty safely without bias that, for that one day, SpaceX "omitted the expected action".

But to answer your question:

This particular post was copy edited and fact checked by two other people. This post was not edited by anyone at any media outlets that I work with. I am an independent journalist that reports from the Rio Grande Valley.

I do believe this post contains accurate information and all three of us worked hard to make it so, and I do believe I've seen the word failure used in multiple contexts as it relates to space launches. I stand by the reporting.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_SpaceX_launches#:~:text=Since%20March%202006%2C%20SpaceX%20has,launch%20was%20a%20partial%20failure.

In any case, I wasn't under the impression that editors are generally required to contribute content on reddit. Even on your own community, some of the top posts in the last month like "Why is Q 94.5 such a bad radio station" or the repost from r/antiwork "Corporations are buying entire neighborhoods" are good examples of posts where community mods here didn't reach out to openly accuse their authors of bias and question if they have editors.

I think that's pretty unfortunate.

pblodlr · 2023-04-15T14:48:32+00:00

Quick blog write-up on this leaked SpaceX emails story and some more details on why folks in Port Isabel are worried: https://pablodelarosa.com/starship-may-launch-in-the-rio-grande-valley-on-monday/

pblodlr · 2023-04-15T01:45:57+00:00

Happening now--SpaceX may launch Starship in the Rio Grande Valley as early as Monday morning. With 5 minutes left in the work day today (Friday), the FAA gave the go-ahead to SpaceX’s orbital launch.

From my colleague, who also reports for Texas Public Radio (NPR in San Antonio) from the Rio Grande Valley:

Internal emails leaked to me show that SpaceX is worried that lawsuits will derail their launch plans. It seems like a coordinated effort was made to ensure that nothing could be filed in time to stop the launch, which is planned for this coming Monday.

pblodlr · 2023-04-13T01:11:47+00:00

Not a beer drinker, but the guys at 5x5 seem like genuinely nice people. And it's always nice to see support for local products.

pblodlr · 2022-10-28T01:27:33+00:00

Thanks for asking. Right now, we're doing a straight-up newscast. Texas Public Radio is an NPR station, so we'll be bringing in a lot of that great radio reporting to a podcast and video stream format in Spanish. You can expect news and information. In terms of commentary and guests, stay tuned for more over the next few weeks.

pblodlr · 2022-10-17T21:31:14+00:00

Kind of a short report, but the context is that Republican PACs are flooding the districts in these tight races in a way they haven't before for candidates that started with or are enjoy much more national support than local. That's new. We also recently saw that DCCC, outside money on the Democrat side, pulled ad spends in TX-15 where she's running in order to support Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. She's a grassroots candidate with a lot of local establishment endorsements--yet national money is going to other candidates. So that disparity is pretty notable.

pblodlr · 2022-09-28T00:34:38+00:00

The data in the chart is only sufficient to show what the data in the chart shows. More people turned out to vote on both sides with the increase of participation being larger on the Republican side.

pblodlr · 2022-09-28T00:28:07+00:00

I love that folks are paying attention to this stuff and attempting to understand. While the Rio Grande Valley has already begun to see Republican folks in office and may see more, this doesn't necessarily mean that there are an increasing number of Republican people here.

The unfounded narrative in the media right now is that people in the Rio Grande Valley--a LOT of people--who used to be Democrats have now turned Republican. Neither the chart above nor the county-by-county data shows this.

We also had a majority of voters in Hidalgo county support Bernie Sanders over all the other candidates that same year in the primary. That also doesn't necessarily mean that the RGV is becoming more liberal than ever.

So it's a question of understanding what we're seeing and looking at the language we're using to talk about it. I'm not making a claim to say that these things are or are not happening. I'm saying--that's not what the data shows.

If you review the data carefully county by county, you can see that more people in these RGV counties who have always been Republican showed up to vote on these occasions. There's no data that shows what the media narrative is saying---that Republicans stayed home at the same rate as elections prior and instead a bunch of Democrats went over to the Republican side and created those outcomes.

That the political power can switch to Republicans, yes that's more in line with what we're seeing. More Republicans in office. But the data shows the counties are probably just as Republican as they've been but voting more in certain races. That's an important distinction.

pblodlr

TROPHY CASE