AUSTIN (KXAN) — The company SpaceX is breaking ground on a “new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility” in Austin. That’s according to a new update on the company’s website where jobs are posted.
SpaceX is based in Hawthorne, Calif. but has offices across the country, including two existing Texas sites: a launch facility in Brownsville and a rocket testing facility in McGregor. The company’s founder Elon Musk has increasingly moved his business ventures and his personal life, to the Lone Star State.
Musk confirmed in December 2020 that he had moved to Texas, and while he hasn’t directly admitted he lives in Austin, his comments in interviews seem to suggest that is possible.
Over the past year, several of Musk’s ventures have placed roots in the Austin area with Tesla announcing plans to build a Gigafactory for manufacturing electric vehicles in Travis County, Boring Company hiring in the Austin area, and Musk’s private foundation relocating from California to Austin.
In a change from just weeks earlier, Austin is now listed as a potential location for SpaceX jobs on the company’s website. Two jobs are posted there, an Automation and Controls Engineer for the SpaceX project Starlink and an Assembly and Packaging Equipment Engineer. Both of those positions are listed as remote work roles from Austin, but the job descriptions appear to be tied to this new manufacturing facility. The job descriptions state that these roles will aim to manufacture devices to be sent directly to customers such as Starlink dishes, WiFi routers, and mounting hardware.
Both of these jobs require that applicants be willing to travel at least a quarter of the time to the SpaceX headquarters in the Los Angeles area until the Austin facility “is fully established.”
It is unclear where exactly this Austin facility will be located.
Musk posted on Twitter Tuesday afternoon that he will be creating a city called Starbase, TX, but didn’t share details about whether that city would be near Brownsville, McGregor, Austin, or somewhere else.
In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, Musk went into detail about why he has been drawn to Austin.
“Austin is a bit like mini California,” Musk said during the February interview. “I was like, asking the team in California, ‘alright where do you wanna — what’s your top choice [for] the next big U.S. factory location, where do you want to spend time?’ The number one choice was Austin.”
Musk said he then asked his team what their number two option would be after Austin, and they were silent.
“Yeah, I think we do need to make sure people moving from California don’t inadvertently recreate the issues that caused them to move in the first place,” Musk also told Rogan that day.
