The Oil Field That Built Midland, and What Comes After It

On July 21, 2026, the City of Midland published a news release from the Midland Development Corporation. The corporation's board and the Midland City Council had approved a performance-based incentive agreement for AST SpaceMobile to build another satellite manufacturing plant at the Midland Spaceport Business Park. The release put the building at more than 400,000 square feet. It said the project would create 1,800 full-time jobs and $144 million in annual payroll at full build-out, and that the company would make $100 million in taxable capital investment in Midland through 2034.

The same release said the incentive is not a grant paid up front. AST SpaceMobile is eligible for up to $66 million over 30 years. That figure includes a $16 million ground lease reimbursement returned to the city, and annual performance payments capped at $3.3 million in a fiscal year. The city wrote that the agreement includes no tax incentives, so the City of Midland, Midland County, Midland ISD, Midland College, and the Midland Memorial Hospital District would receive the full taxable value of the investment immediately. Mayor Lori Blong, quoted in the release, called the project a defining moment for Midland's future and said incentives are earned only after verified performance metrics.

That is a present-tense fact about a county the Handbook of Texas still describes, in an entry last revised on December 2, 2020, as the administrative center of the Permian Basin oil fields. The handbook is the right source for how the county got its name. It is the wrong source for how many people live there now.

How the county got its name

According to the Handbook of Texas, the Texas Legislature established Midland County in 1885 from land that had belonged to Tom Green County, and the county was organized the same year. The handbook says the county was named for its place halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso on the Texas and Pacific Railway. The town of Midland became the county seat.

The handbook's separate entry on the city fills in the station. In late June 1881 the Texas and Pacific, building between Dallas and El Paso, put a section house at the midpoint and called it Midway. Herman N. Garrett, who brought sheep from California, is named as the first permanent resident, in 1882. A post office was granted on January 4, 1884, while the settlement was still attached to Tom Green County. The handbook says the name had to change because other Texas towns were already called Midway. Midland was the name that cleared the post office.

The county entry puts the 1885 population of the area at about 300 people. Ranching followed the rails. The handbook says Nelson Morris, a Chicago meatpacker, bought 200,000 acres from the state for a Black Angus ranch and was the first to fence county land. By 1890 the census counted 1,033 people, and the agricultural census reported 14,867 cattle and 13,364 sheep. No crops were reported that year.

Oil changed the town's job. The county entry says discoveries in Reagan County in 1923 and in Ector County in 1926 turned Midland into a headquarters city for oil companies before Midland County's own big production. County wells boomed in 1945. The Midland South Pool in 1947, the handbook says, established the wealth of the Permian Basin, and another boom followed from 1949 to 1952. The handbook's barrel counts stop in the early 1990s. They are not used here as a current figure.

What the county runs on now

Two public sources describe the county's present economy without borrowing the handbook's old barrel counts.

The U.S. Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 county population estimates, in the file co-est2025-alldata.csv, put Midland County at 187,855 people on July 1, 2025. The same vintage uses an April 1, 2020 estimates base of 170,341. The July 2025 estimate is 17,514 people above that base. The handbook's 2014 figure, 155,830, is an older number in an older article. The census file is the one that carries a date.

Diamondback Energy's own investor FAQ says the company is an independent oil and natural gas company headquartered in Midland, and that its work is the Permian Basin in West Texas. The FAQ says Diamondback priced its initial public offering on October 11, 2012, at $17.50 a share, and that the common stock trades as FANG. The company's contact page lists the office at 500 West Texas Avenue, Suite 100, Midland, Texas 79701.

Taken together, the handbook and Diamondback's own page say the same plain thing. Midland's long job has been running the oil business from town, not only pumping it inside the county line. The July 2026 city release is the document that adds a large non-energy plant beside that job.

The company that is building the next plant

AST SpaceMobile's own company page says it is headquartered in Midland and that it is building a space-based cellular broadband network meant to work with ordinary smartphones. The page says the company has more than 500,000 square feet of manufacturing space in the United States and elsewhere, and it lists more than one Midland site. Those are the company's words, dated on its site, not a count this publication made.

The company has been in Midland longer than the 2026 agreement. Its November 15, 2018 release said AST & Science had picked Midland for a high-volume satellite plant and for its corporate headquarters, in an 85,000-square-foot building at the Space Port Business Park beside Midland International Air and Space Port. The 2026 city release calls the new agreement an additional expansion.

Shanti Gupta, the company's chief operating officer, is quoted in that city release. He said the continued investment reflected the manufacturing environment and the air and space port, and that Midland would remain at the center of the company's manufacturing strategy as it scaled production. Brad Bullock, chairman of the Midland Development Corporation board, is quoted in the same release saying the jobs are high-paying and that the board built the agreement to protect the public investment.

The release also states a limit. Incentive payments are reduced, withheld, or repaid if the company misses the milestones on jobs, payroll, capital investment, and operations. The 1,800 jobs and the $144 million payroll are what the city says the project will produce at full build-out. They are not a claim that those jobs exist on the day this article is published.

What the records support

The handbook's wage and barrel figures stay in the years it names. They are not updated here by guessing. The census file is an estimate. The July 21, 2026 release is an agreement, not a ribbon-cutting. Diamondback's pages show a Midland headquarters. They do not say what share of county jobs the company holds.

The sequence those records do support is short. A railroad midpoint became a county in 1885. Oil companies made it a headquarters town in the 1920s and after. A census estimate dated July 1, 2025, counts 187,855 people. In the summer of 2026 the city wrote down a contract to add a satellite factory beside the oil offices, with the public money tied to performance.