What's actually inside the Boring Bodega
Less mystery, more glass than expected. A walk-through of the public-facing portion, what's parked behind the building, and which roads got widened to support it.
Six miles from the bodega, the launch pads are not visible. The traffic on FM 20 is. So is the new ground station, the new water draw, the new neighbors who pay cash. This page reads what the freeway can't — the corridor as it shows up in our county, written by the people who already live here.
Five sites a county away or closer. Coordinates approximate; field-checked when we drive past.
Field notes. What we see, what we hear, what shows up on the gravel road before it shows up in the news.
Less mystery, more glass than expected. A walk-through of the public-facing portion, what's parked behind the building, and which roads got widened to support it.
The relocations didn't come with a press release. They came with rental listings, school enrollment, and a bump in 6:30 AM traffic on Highway 71.
Coordinates, line-of-sight, and what the parcel looked like the week before construction started. A short photo essay.
What a three-bedroom on a half-acre actually goes for once the corridor became a destination. Numbers, not narratives.
Highway 71 + FM 969 + Texas 130. Travel times, freight patterns, and the new pull-offs that weren't there last year.
The corridor as seen from the porch where this site is written. What you can hear at night. What the satellite passes look like from down here.
Capsule profiles. What each does in the world, and what each does in our county.
Tunnel-boring equipment maker; relocated headquarters to Bastrop County. The "Boring Bodega" is the public-facing storefront and gathering point on the property. Test segments run on the parcel.
Formerly Twitter. Substantial portions of staff and operations have been moved to a Bastrop-area campus over the past year. The footprint expands a little more each quarter.
SpaceX's broadband subsidiary operates ground-station infrastructure in Central Texas. Quiet sites, fenced lots, gravel access roads, and a lot of antennas pointed up.
About 30 miles west of the corridor. Not in our county, but it shapes our roads, our supply trucks, and where workers choose to live. Many of them live closer to us than to the plant.
The engine test stands are about 100 miles north. Periodically you can read a Falcon test on a still afternoon if the wind is right. Mostly relevant here as the orbital connection to Starlink and to the broader Musk operating group.
Land deals through LLCs with no public principals. Permit filings without a name on them. Subcontractors who used to fly home and now live here. The corridor's edges are the most interesting part.
Six miles is close enough to feel the changes and far enough to write them down honestly. Housing prices moved before the press releases did. Traffic on FM 20 doubled in the years the bodega was being built. The municipal water meeting that used to draw eight people now draws eighty.
This site exists because the existing coverage of the corridor splits, neatly, into two camps: hagiographers who don't live here, and critics who don't live here. Neither sees the school-bus route, the price of a used F-150, or how loud the test stand is at 9 PM in summer. We do. So we'll write it down.
The aim is observational, not editorial. When we have an opinion we'll say so. When we don't, we'll show the receipts and let you draw your own.
Musk Mile is written by residents of Bastrop County, Texas. We don't speak for any of the companies covered here. We are not investors, employees, contractors, or critics—we're neighbors with reasonable curiosity and a commitment to writing down what we observe.
We use first-person plural deliberately. The corridor is too big for one set of eyes, and the contributors prefer to keep their day jobs separate from this page.
Tips, photos, public-record finds, and gentle corrections are all welcome at the address below. We respond to every signed message. We do not respond to legal threats; route those through the Texas state bar.