SpaceX will spend $100 billion on a new spaceport in Louisiana

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, said Tuesday it will spend $100 billion to build a launch facility in south Louisiana as it aims to send more rockets a day into space.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry said at an event in Abbeville, Los Angeles, that the new facility will be called Starbase Louisiana. It will be on part of 125,000 acres of coastal marshland and will bring 3,000 jobs to the area, they said.

Mr. Landry, a Republican, compared the deal to President Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase, which opened up the West to the country. The partnership with SpaceX, he said, will bring opportunities to his state.

“Today, Louisiana will give America its stars,” Mr. Landry said.

The site would be SpaceX’s second private launch site after Starbase, its South Texas headquarters, and could help move the company closer to its goals of an extraterrestrial construction industry and turning humans into a multiplanetary species. Mr. Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, has talked about sending thousands of rockets into orbit a year, and SpaceX will need at least a few sites to make that happen.

“It’s no secret that we intend to launch Starship a lot and aim for thousands of flights per year,” SpaceX published on X in May. “This cadence will require the ability to launch from many different locations, so we are constantly looking for viable locations to expand Starship operations in the future, both domestically and internationally.”

Mr. Musk did not appear in Abbeville on Tuesday, but wrote online during the event that the Louisiana spaceport would be “the largest launch site on Earth” and would allow more than 30 rocket flights a day. In a video accompanying the news, he said the development would bring about 10,000 jobs to the area.

In her speech, Ms Shotwell lowered job expectations to around “3,000 permanent jobs”.

Louisiana Economic Development, the state’s business development agency, said construction is expected to begin next year, with the first run expected “as early as 2029.”

Louisiana “offered SpaceX a competitive incentive package contingent on capital investment, job creation and a $25 million charitable donation” to a local community fund, the development authority added. He did not specify the incentives directly, but said that in lieu of taxes, SpaceX will pay installments of more than $25 million a year to Vermilion Parish, where the spaceport will be located. Those payments are expected to total $820 million over 25 years, the agency estimates.

A spokeswoman for Louisiana Economic Development said SpaceX had previously paid the state $100 million for the land.

A spokesman for SpaceX and a spokesman for the governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Beyond Starbase in Texas, where SpaceX builds its largest-ever Starship rocket, the company launches rockets from government-owned sites including Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. SpaceX has sent more than 100 rockets into space this year, with most of those flights using its smaller Falcon 9 rocket, according to its website.

Last month, SpaceX completed its 13th test of the Starship, which carried and deployed the company’s signature Starlink internet satellites before plunging into the Indian Ocean. Unlike its previous partially reusable rockets, SpaceX is working to make the Starship fully reusable, with Mr. Musk envisioning the rocket could be launched and landed many times a day like an airplane.

Mr. Musk, who has a history of exceeding self-imposed deadlines and falling short of his publicly stated promises, has bet big on the Starship, which he has said will eventually take humans to Mars. He said Starship will also carry AI data centers into space. On Monday, Mr. Musk published on X that the company will launch its first data center into space by the end of next year.

This year, SpaceX also pledged to help build Terafab, a computer chip factory in Texas that is a joint venture with Mr. Musk’s electric car company Tesla. That project will cost at least $55 billion, and spending could reach $119 billion, according to public filings.