Most companies treat skilled trades as something they buy. SpaceX treats them as something it builds, at the scale of a company town. That choice is a useful lesson, because SpaceX is competing for the same welders and machinists every other American manufacturer needs, and it decided not to wait for the market to supply them.
How many people does Starbase employ?
| Year | Starbase site workforce |
|---|---|
| 2020 | ~500 |
| 2023 | 2,100+ |
| 2024 | 3,400+ (employees + contractors) |
| Projected | up to ~8,000 direct |
Sources: contemporaneous reporting and the SpaceX-provided Cameron County 2026 impact report. About 70 percent of the workforce is local to the Rio Grande Valley; the site drives roughly $13B in annual regional economic value.
What is the Starfactory, and why does it need so many trades?
The Starfactory is SpaceX's Starship production plant at Starbase, and by SpaceX's own description it is about one million square feet built to bring the manufacturing process under one roof, with a stated goal of eventually producing 1,000 Starships a year. The nearer-term target has been described as roughly one Starship per day. Starship is built from stainless steel, so that production rate translates directly into demand for welders and fabricators. You do not reach a ship a day on engineers alone. You reach it on a floor full of people who can join metal to spec.
Which skilled trades does SpaceX hire?
The build depends on welders, machinists, technicians, and manufacturing specialists by the thousands. SpaceX runs continuous openings for TIG, structural, laser, and pipe welders and tank fabricators who work stainless steel, carbon steel, Inconel, aluminum, and titanium, along with build, test, and structures technicians. These are production-floor trades, and they are the same roles in structural shortage across the country. SpaceX just refuses to let that shortage set its build rate.
Why did SpaceX build its own workforce, and its own city?
Because the workforce is the constraint, and SpaceX vertically integrates its constraints. In May 2025, residents voted 212 to 6 to incorporate Starbase, Texas, as a city, with a SpaceX vice president as mayor. Read past the novelty and it is a workforce strategy: house the people, draw 70 percent locally, and control the pipeline that feeds the floor. Most manufacturers cannot incorporate a town. The underlying move, though, building your own talent instead of renting it, is available to anyone. That is the choice Arklight lays out in build, buy, or rent your industrial workforce.
What does SpaceX say about the wider shortage?
That the build-your-own model works, and that most companies need a way to do it without founding a city. SpaceX competes in the same national skilled-trades market measured by the Arklight Demand Model, and its answer, build the pipeline and source locally, is exactly the answer Trade School 2.0 makes available at a smaller scale. The company that referred a colleague to Arklight was, in effect, recognizing the same problem from the other side.
The bottom line
SpaceX is the proof of concept. When production depends on skilled trades, the winning move is to build the workforce, not bid for it. Not every manufacturer can incorporate a city. Every manufacturer can build a pipeline.