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Elon Musk just made South Texas the planet's most interesting place for space travel

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is building his SpaceX rocket prototypes in Texas, not California.

Days after massive layoffs shook SpaceX, the company announced plans to bring its Mars Starship prototype and testing to Boca Chica Beach in South Texas, instead of California.

After winning approval to build the test ship at the Port of Los Angeles' Terminal Island last year, SpaceX planned to set up a launchpad for the interplanetary spaceship. The rocket and its launch vehicle would be the largest rocket ever built, and could have brought 700 jobs to the region.

But billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is bringing his test rockets to Texas, citing the difficulty in moving the Starship prototypes because of their size. SpaceX tests all of its rocket engines at a plant in McGregor, west of Waco.

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The decision was also made to streamline operations, the Hawthorne, California-based company said in a statement.

“We are building the Starship prototypes locally at our launch site in Texas, as their size makes them very difficult to transport,” Musk said.

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The move by SpaceX is a loss for the California economy. But California's loss is no doubt Texas' gain.

The greater Brownsville area has been reinvigorated with the spaceship's construction complete, according to the Houston Chronicle. SpaceX has assembled one prototype at the Gulf of Mexico site near the U.S.-Mexico border.

Musk also said in a tweet that this prototype – or "test hopper" – is not at full height and is suborbital. This means the craft will be capable of reaching outer space but must return to Earth without making an orbital revolution.

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Additional research and development of Starship will continue in Hawthorne, according to tweets from Musk.

Since Musk brought SpaceX to South Texas in 2014, there has been little activity around the site.

The Starship is outfitted with a shiny, retro-looking finish that Musk described in a tweet as a concept that needed "to be made real," later adding that it obviously "must be more pointy tho."

Last Friday, SpaceX announced it would lay off 10 percent of its roughly 6,000 workers, most of them at its Hawthorne headquarters. The company said it needs to become leaner to accomplish ambitious and costly projects such as the Starship and Starlink, which would create a constellation of satellites to provide space-based broadband internet service.

The California-based company was founded with the goal of reducing the cost of space travel and eventually facilitating the colonization of Mars.

SpaceX last year launched the Falcon Heavy -- a rocket described as the world's most powerful -- from Kennedy Space Center and turned heads by sending a Tesla into space with it. At the time, Musk floated the idea of testing still bigger versions in Texas.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.