MCGREGOR, Texas — We have blastoff on a new SpaceX facility in McGregor. A manufacturing facility will be built on the 4,300 acres of land that the company already uses as a rocket testing site, CEO Elon Musk announced Saturday.
"I'm excited for what SpaceX is bringing and what they've already done. I'm excited about the future of that industrial park," McGregor City Manger Kevin Evans said.
The new plant will build Raptor 2 engines. The goal is to create a fleet of ships that will send crews to Mars and build a city on the red planet. Evans said he sees the company being a historical point of pride for the city.
"They're solid corporate citizens, they just do a really good job. This entire industrial does and will attract people from all over the employment base which is about 800,000 people."
Donald Citrano's Coffee Shop Cafe has been a staple in McGregor since 1998. The owner, Donald Citrano has seen Musk in the restaurant a few times and serves his employees on a daily basis.
"They have a cafeteria out there, they built one a few years ago but we get like 15 people a day at least," he said. "They're good people, my servers like them and they like us."
His favorite part about having SpaceX in town is the rumble of the rockets which can be heard in surrounding areas.
"It's good conversation piece, like I said, every time it goes off, somebody is talking either good or bad about it, either way it's good advertising."
He is so used to it at this point that he has even altered part of the restaurant to make sure it can handle the shake.
"My wife realized she had a lot of pictures on the wall, and we had to go ahead and screw them into the wall because a couple of them fell but now they're screwed into the wall, we don't worry about it," he said.
Musk estimated the city on the red planet could be built in "roughly 20 years," saying it will hopefully be ready by 2050.
SpaceX already has a campus in McGregor that employs around 500 people who work on 4,300 acres of land in the city.