One of the most potent ideas for actually building things in America again is to create Special Economic Zones (SEZs) — swathes of land that operate free of hostile regulation. The iconic example is Shenzhen, which China made an SEZ in 1980, stripping it of most regulation and allowing market capitalism to run free. As a result, Shenzhen became China’s tech capital, a cyberpunk futurescape complete with high-speed rail and one of the world’s largest ports.

In February, Tomas Pueyo proposed turning Guantanamo Bay into an American Shenzhen. Now, he’s returned to explain why we should lift regulations on Starbase, the newly incorporated Texan city home to SpaceX. We could subsequently transform it into the world’s first space portal metropolis — a bustling company town built around future travel to Mars, the moon, and wherever else we dare. Enjoy.

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What’s the best place to propel the United States into the future? This small circle:

This dot was just incorporated into the United States’ newest city: Starbase. As of last December, Starbase is home to SpaceX headquarters. It’s also one of the southernmost points in the contiguous US.¹ That’s very useful for launching rockets.

Rockets are mainly limited by their ability to escape the Earth’s gravity. Giant rocket ships burn literal tons of fuel — including a hefty share burnt just bringing the rest of the fuel to orbit. As a result, rocket makers pursue any optimization that allows them to reduce a rocket’s fuel consumption.

One of these optimizations? Launch rockets as close to the equator as possible. Toward the equator, the Earth’s surface moves fastest because it’s farthest from its rotation axis (an imaginary line that runs through the planet from the North to South Poles). Rockets leaving from the equator are already moving quite fast, and can use this momentum to save on fuel.

There’s another upside to Starbase’s location: It’s on the coast, which means SpaceX can transport materials and supplies by ship, which is cheaper than other modes of transport — and especially valuable for rockets, which are so huge it’s hard for them to use roads.

And if you’re going to pick a coast, you’d rather have an eastward than a westward one. As you can see in the animation above, rockets are launched east because that’s the direction of the Earth’s rotation. Plus, if there’s an accident, you’d want debris to fall into the sea, not on somebody’s head. Launch a rocket from an eastern coast and, if it fails, its pieces crash into the ocean.

Starbase meets all of these requirements, making it an ideal place to launch rockets.

• It’s in the contiguous US, thus easily supplied by road

• It’s as close to the equator as possible, to save fuel

• It’s on the coast, for easy water transportation

• It’s on an eastern coast, so failed rocket debris falls into water

This is exactly why America’s longstanding launch site is Cape Canaveral. Notice, however, how much farther north Cape Canaveral is than Starbase — while Florida’s southernmost point is actually farther south than Boca Chica. Why not launch rockets from Florida’s southernmost tip?

The problem is the Bahamas. Launching from Key Largo or another point on Florida’s tip would expose the Bahamas to debris from rocket explosions. Not so in Cape Canaveral.

Launching from Starbase does come with its own limitations, namely Cuba. There are two main pathways to avoid debris falling on Cuba (above or below the island). Flight paths aren’t as wide-open as they are from Cape Canaveral, but the speed gained by launching closer to the equator makes up for that limitation.

This is why SpaceX launches its rockets from here:

Today, Starbase is quite small:

But eventually, it will become something much bigger: the gateway to Mars.

People don’t grasp how momentous this is. Every single megapolis in the world is a transportation hub. New York was the trade hub between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, Chicago between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, London is the head of navigation of the Thames River, Paris the crossroads between the Seine and Marne rivers.

Starbase could become one of the most important cities on Earth: the first interplanetary hub.

In May of this year, Starbase took one more step toward becoming the world’s first space megapolis: It officially incorporated into a city. It now has a mayor and two county commissioners. It has a population of approximately 500, most of whom are SpaceX employees and their families. It’s the first major company town founded on U.S. soil in decades — and, if SpaceX’s growth is any indication, it will only continue to expand.

It will need launchpads, terminals, a bigger port, hotels for people who may one day travel to the moon or Mars, fuel storage, and amenities for the engineers and other workers flocking to Starbase to build the future of humanity.

Luckily, there is some federal land in the area, which could easily be repurposed to expand the city.

However, building anything in the US today is slow, expensive, and mired in bureaucracy. To expand Starbase into the full-fledged city it must become, SpaceX needs the approval of the FAA, EPA, USFWS, USACE, Coast Guard, FCC, and a dozen state and county bodies. This is no way to build a futuristic spaceport.

We could do much more here if we turned Starbase and its surrounding land into a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), an area with reduced regulation that fosters building instead of conservation.

As Balaji Srinivasan proposes, we could deregulate the hundreds of acres of land surrounding Starbase and let Elon — arguably the best person in the world to deploy capital for building the future — use his resources to accelerate the development of critical public services and infrastructure: homes, schools, retail, and recreation. We want the future to come at the speed of Tesla manufacturing, not NIMBY gridlock.

We’ve already found the single best location to propel humanity into the future. If we can get out of our own way, the US may be well on its way to building the world’s first spaceport city — a city that would look forward and up into the stars. A city built to shape what’s next, rather than remaining trapped by the fears and failures of our past.

A city of dreams.

—Tomas Pueyo

¹ The tip of Florida is very slightly further south, and the Florida Keys are further south than that.

An earlier version of this piece appeared in Uncharted Territories.