SpaceX to Spend $100 Billion on Spaceport in Louisiana

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, said on Tuesday that it would commit $100 billion to building a launch facility in southern Louisiana, as it aims to send multiple rockets into space a day.Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, and Louisiana’s governor, Jeff Landry, said at an event in Abbeville, La., that the new facility would be named Starbase Louisiana.It will be on 125,000 acres of coastal marshland and 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 the stars,” Mr.

Landry said.The site would be SpaceX’s second private launch site after Starbase, its headquarters in South Texas, and could help move the company closer toward its goals of building industries off Earth and making humans a multiplanetary species.Mr.

Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive, has spoken about sending thousands of rockets into orbit a year, and SpaceX will need at least several locales to make that happen.“It’s no secret that we intend to launch Starship a lot, targeting thousands of flights per year,” SpaceX posted on X in May.“That cadence will require the ability to launch from many different locations, so we are constantly exploring to find viable sites 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 biggest launch site on Earth” and enable more than 30 rocket flights a day.In a video with that message, he said the development would bring about 10,000 jobs to the area.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while...