(CNN) — SpaceX on Tuesday unveiled plans to construct a massive, $100 billion spaceport in Louisiana, where the company plans to launch its gargantuan Starship rocket thousands of times per year.
Construction of the spaceport is expected to begin by the end of next year near the southern coast of Louisiana’s Vermilion Parish, with the first launch targeted as soon as 2029, according to an economic development website.
Such a development would mark a dramatic shift for SpaceX and the US rocket industry — making Louisiana, which has never before hosted an orbital launch, perhaps the busiest launch hub on the planet.
The new SpaceX campus will be dubbed “Starbase, Louisiana” — borrowing the name of SpaceX’s recently incorporated company town in South Texas. Starbase, Texas, is the current home to Starship’s testing and development facilities and the spot from which 13 test flights have launched to varying degrees of success.
The Louisiana location, however, would host flights of the Starship rocket once its operational, having proven it can safely haul cargo to orbit. SpaceX also plans to land and recover every piece of its Starship rockets — including the upper spacecraft, which has never been done before — in order to allow the rockets to be rapidly reused and drive down the cost of each launch.
That means Louisiana would not only become a hub for launches, but it would become home to numerous towers — standing hundreds of feet tall — that would be used to recapture rockets and spacecraft as they return from space.
“Starbase Louisiana will ultimately have over a dozen launch towers, enabling more than 30 Starship flights per day and making it the biggest launch site on Earth!” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on his social media platform, X, on Tuesday.
During an announcement event in Louisiana Tuesday, SpaceX’s chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, also described the project as “a self-sustaining spaceport with its own propellant production, power generation, deep water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and probably an airport.”
Louisiana’s ‘worst kept secret’
SpaceX had been quietly working on its spaceport plans alongside Louisiana elected officials for months. Company leaders have traveled to the state to scope out potential locations, prompting one local news outlet to refer to the project as the state’s “worst kept secret.”
State governor Jeff Landry, a Republican, billed the project as an offer of “a permanent future and lasting prosperity.”
“For generations, industries came to Louisiana not to build lasting prosperity, but to extract wealth,” Landry said. “Too often, Louisiana was left with the scars, while others enjoyed the profit. Today, what Elon Musk and his team is offering Louisiana is different.”
Much about the plans remain to be seen. Starship is not yet operational. The company is expected to launch its most important test flight to date as soon as September — a mission that could send the rocket to orbit for the first time. Additional testing will be necessary to sort out how the rocket’s upper stage can be landed and flown again.
A spaceport of such size and scale as the Louisiana project will also likely face extensive regulatory reviews: “The project will go through all applicable environmental, wetlands, natural resource and launch-related reviews,” a project website confirms.
Such reviews related to SpaceX’s facilities in Texas — a far smaller complex than the planned Louisiana site — took nearly a decade to complete. And some local environmental advocacy groups continue to battle the company in Texas courts over the impacts of rocket testing on the community.
Shotwell said Tuesday that SpaceX plans to keep “very large portions” of Starbase Louisiana’s 125,000 acres of land “untouched, so that high-value wetlands stay habitat and don’t become infrastructure.”
“We will help fund protection, restoration, and stewardship while we build,” Shotwell said.
The announcement is the latest in a long list of displays of confidence that Starship will transform SpaceX as a company. Already, SpaceX has said it’s begun to phase out use of its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets, which are currently the most prolific launch vehicles in the world, in favor of using Starship for most missions once it becomes operational.
Earlier on Tuesday, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, said a Falcon 9 rocket that took flight the same morning would be the last ever to carry SpaceX Starlink satellites from Florida — an area due East of Orlando that is currently home to the world’s busiest spaceport across Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Space Force Center.
“From here on, Starlink missions out of Florida will fly on Starship,” Dontchev said. “The West Coast team will continue regularly launching Starlink from Vandenberg. Super proud of this incredible team. You’ve made Falcon 9 the most reliable launch vehicle in history. You also helped build the largest low-Earth orbit satellite constellation providing connectivity to millions around the world, and you’ve set the foundation for what’s next.”
SpaceX’s plans include continuing to fly Starship out of Texas, and it may begin flights from Florida as soon as this year. But the envisioned plans for Louisiana would make it by far the largest base of operations for the rocket.
The-CNN-Wire
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