Good Lord, this is duuuuuuuumb.
A federal committee rejected a proposal on Thursday to rename Boca Chica Beach in South Texas to “Cyber Beach.” The move preserves the historic name despite a SpaceX supporter’s effort to rebrand the public beach near the company’s Starbase launch site.
The U.S. Board on Geographic Names’ Domestic Names Committee voted against the proposal during its monthly meeting. The decision means Boca Chica Beach will remain the official name used on federal maps and records.
Boca Chica Beach sits at the southern tip of Texas near the mouth of the Rio Grande. The beach has carried its current official name since 1936 and has long been a destination for fishing and camping along the Texas Gulf Coast.
In recent years, however, it’s become the center of SpaceX’s growing footprint throughout the region. The public beach sits next to the company’s Starbase launch and production complex, where SpaceX builds and tests its Starship rockets.
The name-change proposal was submitted in late 2024 by Josh Hazel, a SpaceX supporter from Mississippi who said the new name would recognize the beach’s role in spaceflight development at SpaceX’s nearby Starbase launch site. The area has become the focus of ongoing debates over public beach access, environmental protections and Elon Musk’s expanding influence in the region, particularly after voters approved incorporating the company town of Starbase in May 2025.
In the proposal, Hazel wrote that enthusiasts commonly refer to the area as “Cyber Beach” and that formalizing the name would commemorate “the location where inter-planetary travel was started.”
When asked about the significance of the term “cyber,” Hazel said it was “a hat tip to the CyberTruck.”
“Many references around Starship and the CyberTruck use the Cyber moniker just to infer the reference of out-of-this-world exploration or experiences and such,” Hazel wrote.
Ahead of Thursday’s vote, the proposal received little institutional support.
That’s putting it mildly, as the city of Starbase (already renamed for Elon!), Cameron County, the Texas Geographic Names Committee, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and a passel of elected officials all said some form of “hell no” to this. In a less brain-rotted world, the idea that some out-of-stater could get the federal government to rename a part of Texas would be treated like out-of-state picante sauce. I’m glad some shred of sanity was maintained, but how did it even come to this? What are we even doing?
Naming a beach, “Cyber,” after Musk’s ridiculous, overhyped, underperforming, failed truck is no sillier than naming a city, “Starbase.”
I am seeing fewer and fewer of these ugly trucks. The name sounds dated and stupid now and that will only get worse over time.
There’s only one car more unattractive than a Pontiac Aztec…