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SpaceX, Elon Musk\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, and Louisiana\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Mr. Landry, a Republican, compared the deal to Thomas Jefferson\u2019s 1803 Louisiana Purchase that opened up the West to the country. The partnership with SpaceX, he said, would bring opportunities to his state.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, Louisiana will give America the stars,\u201d Mr. Landry said.<\/p>\n
The site would be SpaceX\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s no secret that we intend to launch Starship a lot, targeting thousands of flights per year,\u201d SpaceX posted on X in May. \u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Musk did not appear in Abbeville on Tuesday but wrote online during the event that the Louisiana spaceport would be \u201cthe biggest launch site on Earth\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In her speech, Ms. Shotwell pared job expectations down to around \u201c3,000 permanent jobs.\u201d She and Mr. Landry did not give a date for when the spaceport would be completed.<\/p>\n
A SpaceX spokesman and a spokeswoman for the governor\u2019s offices did not return requests for comment.<\/p>\n
Beyond Starbase in Texas, which is where SpaceX manufactures Starship, its largest-ever rocket, the company also 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 sent more than 100 rockets into space this year, with its smaller Falcon 9 rocket used on a majority of those flights, according to its website.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Last month, SpaceX completed its 13th test of Starship, which carried and deployed the company\u2019s signature Starlink internet satellites, before splashing down in the Indian Ocean. Unlike its previous partially reusable rockets, SpaceX is working to make Starship fully reusable, with Mr. Musk projecting that the rocket could be launched and landed many times a day like an airplane.<\/p>\n
Mr. Musk, who has a history of blowing past self-imposed deadlines and not fulfilling his publicly stated promises, has bet big on Starship, which he has said will eventually take humans to Mars. He has said Starship will also carry A.I. data centers into space. On Monday, Mr. Musk posted on X that the company would put its first data center in space by the end of next year.<\/p>\n
This year, SpaceX also committed to help build Terafab, a computer chip manufacturing plant in Texas that is a joint venture with Mr. Musk\u2019s electric car company, Tesla. That project will cost at least $55 billion, and spending could reach $119 billion, according to public filings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n