Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX announced on Tuesday that it intends to build a vast space base in Louisiana, in the southern United States, for at least 100 billion dollars.
It will be intended to host each year “thousands of flights” of Starship, the mega-rocket it is currently developing in Texas to carry trips to the Moon and Mars or even send data centers into space, she explained.
“Today marks a decisive turning point for Louisiana,” praised Republican Governor Jeff Landry of the state in a statement.
Located on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, renamed “Gulf of America” by the Trump administration, the site chosen is more than two and a half times larger than the American capital Washington.
The space base that will be installed there is expected to count “in the long term more than a dozen launch towers, which will allow more than 30 Starship flights per day and will make it the largest launch site on the planet!”, said Elon Musk on his social network X.
Construction is due to begin next year, with the first Starship launch planned at the site in 2029.
The space company of the world’s richest man, which went public this year, is nevertheless known for its exaggerated promises and very optimistic deadlines often postponed.
As a reminder, today it launches its rockets from Florida, Texas, and California, but only the Texas-based base called Starbase is currently used for Starship.
This mega-rocket is the largest and most powerful ever developed and SpaceX aims to make it fully reusable.
To carry out this project as well as the very high flight rate on which it is betting, it is working to build new launch pads, but has also been seeking for several years to find other potential launch sites.
