So, essentially SpaceX’s new parking garage will be bigger than your local H-E-B (excluding the largest H-E-B in San Antonio of course). Construction on the garage began earlier this year in February, but it’s expected to be completed by January 7, 2027, according to the TDLR.

SpaceX’s Bastrop facility is a major manufacturing hub for its Starlink satellite internet service, producing terminals and components. It’s located across the street from Hyperloop Plaza, a Musk-owned shopping center which houses The Boring Company, and the new X (formerly Twitter) headquarters.

A “House of Cards” is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It’s also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv.

They have plenty of justification for using that term. Calculations show that, across all low-Earth orbit mega-constellations, a “close approach,” defined as two satellites passing by each at less than 1km separation, occurs every 22 seconds. For Starlink alone, that number is once every 11 minutes. Another known metric of Starlink is that, on average, each of the thousands of satellites have to perform 41 maneuvers per year to avoid running into other objects in their orbit.

That might sound like an efficiently engineered system operating the way it should, but as any engineer will tell you, “edge cases”—the things that don’t happen in a typical environment, are the cause of most system failures. According to the paper, solar storms are one potential edge case for satellite mega-constellations. Typically, solar storms affect satellite operation in two ways.