Elon Musk keeps traveling to Texas to work on SpaceX's new Starship rocket. A local thinks the CEO now uses a historic home as a crash-pad - take a look inside.

• SpaceX is working feverishly to develop Starship, a new rocket system that may stand 39 stories tall, be fully reusable, and revolutionize humanity's access to space.
• Company founder Elon Musk regularly travels to the Starship development site in Boca Chica, Texas. He's stayed there for days at a time to work long, late hours on prototypes alongside SpaceX staff.
• Lodging is tricky, though: The nearest hotel is at least a 30-minute drive away in Brownsville, and his high public profile poses a security risk.
• However, SpaceX continues to purchase homes in the area, and a local is convinced Musk has been staying in an historic A-frame-style home that Business Insider photographed in April 2019.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Making it cheap to get humans and their stuff to and from space is no easy undertaking. But Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, is rushing to do just that at the southern tip of Texas, and allegedly crashing in a historic A-frame home to catch what rest he can between long slogs of work.

Musk has been working late on an unprecedented rocket system called Starship. If realized, the final vehicle would be made of steel, stand 387 feet tall, and be fully reusable. Since most rockets today fall into the ocean after one use, Starship's reusability positions it to replace all other systems by slashing the cost of launching to space by more than 90%.

According to Musk, Starship would be even cheaper to operate per flight than SpaceX's own partly reusable Falcon 9 rockets. Where Falcon 9 costs the company tens of millions to fly up to 25 tons of payload, Starship might cost just $2 million to launch up to 100 tons, Musk said in November.

Such a system could deploy hundreds of SpaceX's next-generation Starlink internet satellites, heave gigantic telescopes into space for NASA, and ferry dozens of passengers into orbit at once. But Musk's big "aspirational" goals for Starship include sending the first cargo to Mars in 2022, launching Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a crew of artists around the moon in 2023, and rocketing the first crewed mission to Mars in 2024.

"I think we could potentially see people fly next year," Musk said in September while unveiling a Starship prototype in Boca Chica, Texas, where SpaceX is building out a private launch site and basing its development program.

Musk now travels to South Texas at least monthly, social media posts by Musk and others show, for hands-on work toward launching the first Starship prototype, which he said might fly as soon as February or March.

During a visit in late December, Musk tweeted he was "up all night" working on the "most difficult part" of Starship's steel structure: the domed ends of 30-foot-wide propellant tanks. (Such a dome failed during a pressurization test weeks earlier, sending it flying hundreds of feet into the air and across a state highway.)

Locals who live in the area - and whom SpaceX is trying to buy out - find it hard to ignore Musk's presence, given his heavy security detail and onlookers who flock to their remote and formerly sleepy retiree-age beach community.

At least one resident, whose identity Business Insider has verified but asked not to be named because of ongoing property sale negotiations with SpaceX, said Musk almost certainly now crashes in an A-frame-style house that SpaceX recently acquired.

"It's perfect," the resident said, adding that the house is not only the nicest of roughly 30 homes in the area, but also the only place that's "secluded and security controlled."

Here's a look inside the home, which also has a special historic significance to the Boca Chica area.