The 521,000-square-foot building — roughly the size of five or six H-E-B stores — is on Walker Watson Road in Bastrop, about a 15-minute drive from downtown and in the middle of a rural area marked by cow pastures and farmland.
The facility will cost an estimated $43 million and is listed as a "shell building," according to filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
It's being referred to officially as "Project Echo" in TDLR filings, although project site documents located on the property itself list the operator as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., more commonly known as SpaceX.
While it's unknown exactly for what purpose the SpaceX facility is being built, it is directly across the street from The Boring Co., a tunnel-digging company owned by Musk. The latter has tried to do business with local governments from Austin to San Antonio. The firm wants to eventually construct an underground-tunneling highway between the two major metropolitan areas.
Musk appears to have visited the new SpaceX site in Bastrop just last month. A video posted to his Twitter account Oct. 2 shows Musk, one of his children and other associates on-site next to the warehouse as a tunnel-boring machine spins up from the ground.
"Prufrock II emerging from the ground," Musk said of the video, which is The Boring Co.'s next generation of tunnel-boring machines.
Prufrock II can tunnel at a speed of 1 mile per week, which is six times faster than the business' current tunnel-boring machines, according to The Boring Co.'s website.
The Prufrock II in Musk's video tunneled from The Boring Co. site to the SpaceX site across the street, a distance of about 100 yards.
Bastrop County is east of Travis County, where Tesla is headquartered.
According to the development order posted on the property, construction on the SpaceX building is expected to wrap up by March.
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