EDITOR’S NOTE: Starbase is SpaceX’s massive rocket development site and the home of Starship — the vehicle Elon Musk envisions as humanity’s path to Mars and that many in the U.S. civil space program see as a way back to the moon. But Starbase started as little more than an impossible stretch of empty land along the South Texas coast.

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Christian Davenport has been a staff writer at The Washington Post for more than 25 years and is also the author of "The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos."