I think you mean the Gulf of Mexico.

It's poor form to let a crybaby bully have his way.

Three: The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway connects Brownsville (and Starbase TX) to New Iberia/Morgan City (where SpaceX has previously contracted the building/maintenance of ASDS barges) via this site. Barges that traverse the GIWW can carry things too large to ship by air or road to and from the Gulf.

This is Chinese-level industrial planning. Amazing.

Also the benefit of marginal environmental regulations...

Hmmm is it though? Quite a few articles like https://futurism.com/future-society/elon-musk-stiffing-contr... make me think they better ask to be paid upfront.

A lot of good, hard working people in that area that would love to have these jobs open up.

If the figures in this announcement hold up, they're gonna spend like $20k per resident of LA. That's insane.

I live around a lot of those people in SW Ohio who find themselves traveling to states like Louisiana for welding, electrical and general contracting work because the expertise isnt there. I have to imagine much of the same will happen and if anything they might reap rewards following construction. Regardless I would assume little to no relevant expertise exists there at the moment.

Are "3,000 new jobs" enough to make a dent though?

Unless of course Musk decides to use the opportunity to advertise Optimus, be it with actually AI able to do it or teleoperator do it.

Incremental domestic capital investment, good.

The level of cynicism, shit-talking, and schadenfreude wish-casting in response to this is crazy. Start cheering on successes. Resist the deconstructionist mindset.

Is it a good time though? - Their Texas suppliers have been chasing payment and Greg Abbott rolled over and let Elon get their property without payment. Not the only Tesla/SpaceX vendor not being paid either. https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/cars/tesla/tesla-cybertruc...

You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.

We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.

(Anyone asking antagonistic questions can go ahead and save their fingers, I won't respond to the petty comments.)

But its also hard not to be. I'm not a fan of Musk and it doesn't even have to do with Musk himself as its a common theme I see among a lot of the big tech companies or really any company doing a big project in my neck of the woods. An hour north east of me, there has been big on going data center projects for 10+ years. Sounds good right? I got a lot of family and friends in the trades. But I can almost set my watch to it. When work ramps up, its always good pay and 15 years of guaranteed work until suddenly its not. 8 months go by, suddenly everything is paused and all those contractors are out of work for a year and a half until things start up again. Then its rinse and repeat.

I love that people see a website about one of musk’s ideas and go “wow this is real and happening” in the year of our lord 2026

Heck. Yeah. I'm with you. This is GOOD.

Social media is unhealthy. You know what else is unhealthy? Hacker News' constant bashing of every. single. thing. ever.

Maybe, but there's some very specific legal language that cpra and the state requires everyone use in referring to some of these issues, and at least part of the land SpaceX is acquiring is involved in coastal restoration lawsuits or deep water horizon settlements or both.

As an engineer working on cpra projects in the past, I've wanted to reword a variety things but was forced to use their legal language.

It's mostly a good thing as it keeps things properly defined in a political context that are meant to have specific technical meanings (like marsh, beach, rebuild vs restore).

For me that makes it more likely to be human-generated. Seems like a "rushing person juggling revs and copy-pasting" mistake.

FWIW, the writing style and tone match pre-LLM SpaceX writing. Of course you can prompt an LLM to mimic style, but somehow the regression-to-average blandness shines through. That can be hard to distinguish from bog standard corporate speak though.

Maybe the site developer saw your comment. They're different now.

Terrestrial datacenter legal restrictions are how SpaceX expects to make a lot of its money in the next 10+ years, so I would be less surprised to find them lobbying for restrictions than against, presuming they spend at all on it.

SpaceX just got $8B more for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

This was my question as well. If they’re as close to the shore as the picture makes it seem, they’ll be underwater with the first Cat 1 they come across, and huge cat 5s are becoming more and more common as time goes on. I wouldn’t want to invest here because how will you keep those 200 foot tall structures standing in 150 mph wind??

Lol this is a reference to Florida (though I love your Space Ghost reference), we have the Kennedy Space Center, and an Airforce base (I guess its a Space Force base now) which has led to this area being referred to as "Space Coast" adding this in case anyone else might be unaware.

Florida is more interesting than people realize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Coast

> I guess it’s probably cheaper?

State of Louisiana was probably on their hands and knees begging. The construction would last decades and anyone with a strong back that can be told what to do and do it will have a job. It would help lift a lot of people in that area out of poverty.

logistically, i wonder how long it takes to ship from Starbase Texas to Louisiana via barge. It has to be easier to get Starships to Louisiana than the East side of Florida.

No expert - but from what I've heard, Florida and Texas are constrained for efficent polar (North/South) orbit launches due to restrictions over populated areas. Whereas Louisiana has the Gulf to the south so no/fewer restrictions to worry about.

They want to launch to sun-synchronous.

There's also a due south launch path at play.

Seems geography constrained. There's wetlands sure but how much they re allowed to build that out, vs LA where any effort to keep the state from shrinking as it does seems fairly welcome.

I expect Musk picked Louisiana because it has some of the weakest corporate regulations of any state and will probably let SpaceX get away with almost anything.

I can count plenty of incredibly ambitious announcements from them that have turned out amazing! In fact, they are an outlier in how many they have challenges they have taken on and succeeded in.

[x] Partially reusable rocket that dropped cost to orbit by an order of magnitude. And no, the space shuttle (while an amazing piece of engineering), doesn't really count. It cost a billion+ to refurbish and did nothing to make space more accessible. Now we have businesses that exist purely because the Falcon 9 exists. Heck, the entire new space industry got validated (and hence got investment) due to SpaceX's success.

[x] Returning human spaceflight capability to the US at a fraction of the price, using the same reusable rocket platform after the old defense primes failed to do so. And then making it cheap enough that it has now also flown about half as many private missions as it did for NASA.

[x] Global satellite constellation providing gigabit-scale internet with 10000+ satellite (once written off by "experts" as yet another "incredibly ambitious project" that will never happen).

[x] Commercializing and bringing down the cost of electric cars to the point where they are actually a viable option now (unlike the compliance cars made by OEMs 10 years ago).

[x] Building the largest rocket to ever exist that now has a clear path to being the first ever fully reusable launch vehicle.

[x] A BCI implant that has now brought back mobility and communication ability to multiple patients with debilitating conditions.

Given that each of these were things that no one had done successfully before, or had failed spectacularly - I don't really care that they took longer than initially planned.

There is, in fact, a graveyard here. It is mostly filled with confident predictions that his companies would never do the things they have since done.

He often promises incredibly ambitious things that don't happen. But, with a fairly reasonable frequency, he promises incredibly ambitious that do happen.

For example, SpaceX is responsible for a massive spike in orbital launches [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...

Nth order effects are powerful things. A single person could change the trajectory of Louisiana in a meaningful way.

Because as China has shown, people get angry when you drop hundreds of tons of steel and propellant on people.

Rockets sometimes fail. SpaceX has one of the lowest failure rates in the industry, but that's still ~0.5%. When they fail near launch, they cause humongous explosions. Because of this, anyone with even a tiny bit of care for people launches over the ocean, so that when it goes oops, it only harms some fish.

The existing launch sites SpaceX uses are good for launching into prograde (Starbase, TX and Cape Canaveral, FL) and retrograde (Vandenberg SFB, CA) orbits, but they are all either unable or kind of marginal for launching into polar/very highly inclined orbits. (Starbase, TX cannot do it at all, Vandenberg SFB, CA has limitations on when you can launch, and Cape Canaveral, FL needs to fly a dogleg which reduces performance.)

Part of their plans for the space datacenters involve launching a lot of mass into sun-synchronous (which is very highly inclined) orbits. For that, they need a launch site with the ocean either to the north or to the south.

So the (eastward) flight path isn't over populated land. Rapid disassembly and all that.

Presumably so rockets can get out over water as quickly as possible in case they fail.

it is to ensure that nothing fall on people's heads

It doesn't. It doesn't even need to be built, since the Stennis Space Center is already there and already has an excluson zone. This is a vanity project.

Can't launch south out of Texas

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-shocking-hazards-of-lo...

Many industries, and SpaceX particularly, will say this like this, then a couple years later be like "oh, it's actually much easier if we destroy it", _do it_, then claim "oh well, nothing to be done now!" and push forward on something else.

"Promises" or "commitments" like this need to be evaluated based on the previous behavior of the people "making" them (although they were very careful with working to not use either of those words, and just imply them)

I agree, and the premise is that we're supposed to believe the remaining waterfowl are going to coexist peacefully with... rocket launches?

Evolution has done stranger things, but my bet is that the birds will find somewhere else to be over learning to not be startled by nearby earth-rumbling explosions.

Building multi-decade service life infrastructure on the coast in this era of the Anthropocene actually requires you (from an engineering point of view, not merely a regulatory one) to have a buffer zone of wetlands, marshes and sea walls to absorb storm surges.

You can still choose to read that cynically, but I think the cynical angle is taking moral ecological credit for a pragmatic engineering reality :P

FEMA flood maps for almost all of Vermilion Parish are VE/AE (highest flood risk) with coastal areas needing to be built 12-15ft above ground:

http://maps.lsuagcenter.com/floodmaps/?FIPS=22113

I'm no Elon fan but they're probably aware of this.

Hurricanes are slow and relatively predictable, and they're burning enough money to be able to truck everything that's not flood resistant inland.

Do you know where NASA's launch facilities are? The Florida coast.

same , you probably have ad blocking on and this video element has tracking/telemetry

Nope

I agree mostly with your stance, but I still have to downvote out of principle for the whole "prove me wrong" statement at the end. Hate that argumentative tatic.

It will be comms mostly, and mostly civilian. That other stuff will happen, but it'll be dwarfed by the effort of supporting several tens of millions of Starlink users.

what's the alternative

This is not a serious position.

Just because you personally prefer to be subjugated doesn't mean anyone else does. That necessarily means being able to defend yourself from bad actors, and history has proven the best way to do that is by investing in technology.