SpaceX Starbase proposes its own municipal court in Texas

SpaceX’s Starbase, the newly incorporated company town wrapped around Elon Musk’s South Texas rocket factory and launch site, is moving to create its own municipal court. According to TechCrunch, the city administrator has submitted an ordinance to the city commission establishing a court with a part-time judge, prosecutor, and clerk; the mayor would serve as judge until an appointment is made for a two-year term.

Starbase is less than a year old and has roughly 580 residents, but it is already assembling a full-stack local state: volunteer fire department, city-run building permits and fire inspections, a planned Starbase Police Department, and now a court to process whatever those services generate. The police plan accelerated after an attempt to contract Cameron County sheriff’s deputies for patrols “fell apart,” TechCrunch reports. Starbase still expects to rely on the county for jail capacity.

The paperwork Starbase filed with the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement frames the move as necessity rather than ambition. In 2025, the city logged 420 calls for law enforcement, 180 fire calls, and 140 EMS calls. The area also recorded 353 crashes, with more than 7,000 vehicles per day on Highway 4, the main route in and out. The city argues the county cannot guarantee dedicated coverage and that the remote location requires fast response.

This is a dream and a nightmare, fused into one ordinance.

On the dream side: exit. When surrounding institutions are slow, politicized, or simply absent, a dense private employer can build municipal capacity quickly. Starbase’s pitch is basically: we have high property values, high median household incomes, a surge of tourists for launches, and a “substantial governmental interest” in protecting spaceflight operations. Translation: we need predictable local services to keep the rocket schedule intact.

On the nightmare side: jurisdiction as vertical integration. A company town that issues permits, fields police, and convenes a court is a regulatory stack that can become indistinguishable from corporate policy—especially when the mayor is temporarily the judge. Even if everyone involved is conscientious, the incentives are obvious: the city’s core economic engine is a single entity; disputes between residents/employees and that entity are not abstract.

The usual defense is that municipal courts are normal and constrained by state law. True, but the real question is practical: who has the time and money to contest a local enforcement action when the employer, landlord ecosystem, and civic apparatus share the same gravitational center?

Starbase is not abolishing government. It is rebuilding it in miniature—optimized for rockets, not for Madisonian paranoia about concentrated power.