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SpaceX Set To Create 300 New US Jobs and Expand Facilities
littlesparkvt writes The SpaceX manufacturing plant in McGregor, TX is set to spend $46 million on an expansion that would create 300 full-time jobs. SpaceX is proposing to invest $46.3 million in the site during the next five years. They will spend $32.4 million in real property improvements and $13.9 million in personal property improvements.
$34M is puny even by Texas standards. Here in N.Y. that can't even buy an election.
I've got news for you, sonny...*New York* is puny by our standards. Yee Haw!!! [gunshots]
It is actually part of the lease they signed - the land must be farmed, not allowed to "just rot unused". McGregor county required it to be farmed.
Funnily the farmer they are seeking is required to be very flexible, effectively doing all the farming at night... because rocket testing comes first and farming work on those fields SpaceX now leases can only be done when no rocket testing is ongoing :)
SpaceX even tried to hire the previous lease holders to farm that land. The problem was that the additional terms of the contract (like you said.... farming at night and working around test schedules) were something those farmers didn't agree to doing. They also needed to go through a criminal background check and verify that they haven't been involved with international arms trades due to requirements of the ITAR laws and the Department of Defense contracts that SpaceX is signing.
All told, bringing the position in-house sounds like a better way to get the job done.
I don't get your complaint. Are you really expecting Elon Musk to personally hire every American into one of his companies?
Also, there aren't more astronauts in the NASA astronaut corps currently. A total in the entire history from the original Mercury 7 astronauts to right now is 339 candidates have "received their wings" to be certified as astronauts, and not all of them have even been into space. The current number is 43, and likely to go down in the near future.
On the other hand, this is 300 new jobs for the people of central Texas, and I think they don't mind high paying industrial jobs that bring in money from outside of the immediate area, unlike new jobs that come from Wal-Mart of a Subway restaurant opening up. This is on top of other substantial moves that the companies of Elon Musk have been doing to hire literally thousands of new workers in the past couple of years.
If only more entrepreneurs had this kind of vision to do something really unique and original.