SpaceX unveils $100 billion Starbase Louisiana on 125,000 acres

SpaceX announced on Tuesday that it will build a second Starship complex in southern Louisiana, a 100 billion dollar project on 125,000 acres of coastal land that the company says will become the largest launch site on Earth.

The site, named Starbase Louisiana, sits on Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish, on land acquired through the state's sale of a former Exxon property. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2027 and SpaceX is targeting a first Starship launch in 2029. Louisiana Economic Development, the state agency involved in the deal, offered a more conservative version of the same timeline: construction starting by the end of 2027, with initial operations expected in 2030.

Ten launch pads are planned. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the complex will eventually support thousands of Starship flights a year — a cadence that would dwarf the roughly 100 Falcon 9 launches the company has flown so far this year. The design is for a self-sustaining spaceport: propellant production, its own power generation, deep-water shipping access, vehicle processing facilities and an airport, so that neither rockets nor fuel have to be trucked in.

The economics attached to the announcement are unusually specific. SpaceX says the site will create more than 3,000 direct jobs over a decade at an average salary of 92,600 dollars, plus more than 30,000 construction jobs at peak buildout.

What the launches are for is the more revealing part. Alongside continued Starlink expansion, SpaceX has said it needs Starship to lift an entire network of satellites dedicated to AI processing — orbital data centres, in effect, moving computation off the planet's power grid and into sunlight.

Two caveats sit underneath the numbers. The first is environmental: 125,000 acres of Louisiana coastal wetlands is a significant piece of a landscape already losing ground to erosion. Shotwell said SpaceX intends to leave very large portions of the site untouched, so that high-value wetlands stay habitat rather than becoming infrastructure, and the company says it has engaged state agencies on wildlife protection and coastal restoration. The second is technical: Starship has not yet returned both its booster and its upper stage on a single flight, the basic requirement for the reusability that thousands of annual launches would depend on.