Texas Supreme Court rejects beach closure lawsuit against SpaceX
The Texas Supreme Court today unanimously rejected the lawsuit by fringe activist groups against SpaceX and the closure of beaches near Boca Chica for Starship/Superheavy launches.
Siding with SpaceX and the attorney general’s office, the Texas Supreme Court on Friday ruled that environmental groups did not have a right to sue to preserve public access to a beach that has been closed during rocket launches. The unanimous ruling said a trial judge properly dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning the groups could not refile it with changes.
The lawsuit was brought by SaveRGV, a very small group of leftist anti-Musk activists who have tried to use lawfare for the past five years to shut down Boca Chica. Later, the Sierra Club and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas joined in. The latter is a fake Indian tribe, as this tribe never existed in Texas at all, and is presently non-existent.
This decision essentially ends the lawfare campaign of these groups. I am sure they will try again, but their options continue to shrink, especially because they have practically no support in the southern Texas region. Everyone else is enthusiastically enjoying the prosperity and wealth SpaceX is bringing to the area.
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I think there is already a law in Texas that ANY piece of land touching a waterway must be publicly accessed.
Something like 500 feet from the shore is public land even on rivers.
So if you own land that a river touches you can not block off access to other people who are using it legally for navigation or camping.
But that shore land can be temporarily blocked off for any number of reasons with local government permitting. Like Space X gets. for safety.
Shorelines are often closed off for health and safety reasons, clean up, construction……
These idiots were trying to argue against closing the beach for safety reasons.
In Texas the public has access to the river bed of what are deemed navigable waters. The daughter of Sam Walton (Walmart founder) had land bordering the Brazos River in North Central Texas. The river in that region is considered navigable. She tried claiming that she had total rights to the river that bordered her land (or ran through it). She was shut down.
Beaches are more complex but the public access is not measured in feet by some terms in law.
Typically it goes to the high tide mark for beaches
Beach access laws are odd. I visited Tybee Island years ago and we walked down a long beach past a lot of mansions. I was rather amused that at one point we were going through what effectively Sandra Bullock’s (IIRC) backyard. I’m sure the paparazzi have a field day with these laws.
In the case of Boca Chica, the Mexico border already has exclusion zones for the border patrol and US military, so it’s just a slight extension of that exclusion zone as far as the public is concerned.
The navigable waterway of a river is public. The banks are not. Meaning one can canoe down the river, but not trespass to launch or land.
It is true that all gulf coast beaches in Texas are public, and the state has a history of enforcing that law including forcing people to remove homes after erosion has caused them to encroach on the remaining beach. But the closures of the Boca Chica beaches are short-term, temporary closes that occur during testing and launches. The litigation was pretextual and dishonest in addition to being unreasonable. I’ll add, the beach there was never considered a prime or popular beach and nicer locations can be found just a little northward.
As launch cadence ramps up over the next few years, I suspect a several-mile stretch of the beach will wind up being permanently closed. Casual photogs and YouTubers will be the most affected. Those with SpaceX permission to set up and maintain robot cameras, not so much.
I would be surprised if Spacex isn’t also having positive economic impact on the Mexico side of the boarder as well.
Can SpaceX can sue them back for legal fees.
I’m assuming the CCP is funding these groups.
This is likely their next gimmick
https://phys.org/news/2026-06-landback-indigenous-country.html
The authors point out the increase in returns has coincided with increased coverage of high-profile, Indigenous-led resistance movements, such as protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline and Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock.
The idea will be to call the Texas ruling moot, in that Boca won’t be Texas anymore.
I guess Italy should go back as the Papal States by this line of thinking.
This needs to be watched as well:
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5242/1
Often the indigenous land return cases have to do with proven historically owned land.
If a historic sight is found or the land was promised to a tribe but then taken away illegally and its documented.
There is nothing historic on the land Space X is using.
No tribe has been asking for it back for the last number of years.
This also happened for the Keystone pipeline.
Do you really think a huge company building that pipeline would not have looked into indigenous claims on the land they needed? The lawyers tied to argue that land next to the reservation was actually on the reservation. Then they tried to claim any spillage would contaminate tribe lands.
I remember the state the protesters left the land in after hey quit. Those so called land lover eco freaks left tons of garbage including campers and other vehicles behind for the company and the public to clean up.
That doesn’t mean they won’t try it again—and this Iranian war caused gas hike is pushing people towards bolshevism.
You can argue that it never works until you are blue in the face—but every time they fill up at the pump, then hear some tech-bro billionaire–they will be resentful even if there was no MSNBC/CNN or whatever. The political pendulum is a thing.
Folks got tired of Dubya–they put Obama in to pull us out of Iraq. Biden leaves the border wide open–they put Trump back in, thinking he won’t bog America down in another mid-East conflict.
And the GOP may pay dearly for that very soon…and the rest of us too
https://reason.com/2025/06/23/a-brief-bloody-history-of-all-the-times-the-u-s-caused-chaos-in-the-middle-east/
If at first you don’t succeed, make more problems for yourself. That seems to be the mantra in Washington when it comes to the Middle East. Every few years, a U.S. president asks Americans to go along with a small military commitment in the region—or starts one without asking the public. Almost inevitably, it causes bigger problems than promised.
Friends turn into enemies. The chaos allows bad actors to grow, or creates new factions with a reason to resent America. The political goalposts shift; the U.S. government discovers that a problem it didn’t care about before is actually a “vital interest.” And time after time, politicians promise that all these problems can go away with just one more decisive strike against the real cause of conflict in the region. No forever war is ever advertised that way from the beginning.
Don’t be absurd. The left has been heading that way for a long time now. Plus, gas prices are dropping. More than seventy cents where I live already.
Why do I get the feeling you’re talking about yourself?
Obama didn’t pull us out of Iraq, and Biden leaving the border open is unrelated to conflicts in Mesopotamia. You have a very simplistic view of matters here, Jeff: can you name any large differences between the Global War on Terror, and the conflict with Iran? I’ll tell you a big one: no American battalions marching through Iranian streets.
The War on Terror is just a euphemism for Cheney’s Folly…invading the wrong country
I expected this outcome. But that doesn’t make it any less satisfying.
They did not teach about the Comecrudos (“raw meat-eaters”) when I was in school so I went to the authoritative source. They were a band once estimated at 400 souls believed to be based in the nearest Mexican state of Tamaulipas. As border-crossing natives (Coahuiltecan) they would have spent time in southern Texas as well. There were hundreds of these tribes with precious little knowledge of their existence collected; the only reason we know about this one was a late-1800s ethnographic and linguistic survey. Since they remained incoherently nomadic, there exists no recognized “Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation.” I have no doubt there remain people who can claim tribal blood, but I suspect they have no standing.
Deep dive: https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/coahuiltecan-indians
And speaking of coastal Texas, happy Juneteenth to all who celebrate it. We might be a bit puzzled that others have taken our local celebration of thanksgiving and prayer and made it a big deal, but we aren’t offended. Just don’t forget the thanksgiving and prayer part.