SpaceX is spending $100bn on a second Starbase, on an old Exxon site in Louisiana

SpaceX will build a second Starbase in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, on a former Exxon property on the Gulf Coast, and it puts the price at $ 100 billion.

The company describes it as a self-sustaining spaceport with its own propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping, vehicle processing, and an airport, which is a fair description of why it has been hiring natural gas traders.

A hundred billion dollars is roughly the market capitalisation of a large industrial company, committed to a single site, by a business that only listed on public markets this year.

That listing is presumably how it gets paid for. SpaceX raised $75bn in the largest IPO in history in June, and a project of this size explains rather a lot about why the company wanted that much capital.

Construction is scheduled to begin in 2027, with SpaceX targeting a first Starship launch from the site in 2029. Louisiana Economic Development is more cautious, putting initial operations at 2030.

A Gulf Coast site allows launches out over water on the trajectories Starship needs; it has the deep-water access to move vehicles by barge, and Louisiana has both the industrial workforce and the political appetite to host it.

The employment case is what state agencies price these deals on. SpaceX projects 3,000 direct jobs over ten years at an average of $92,600 a year, plus more than 30,000 construction roles at peak.

Those are strong numbers for coastal Louisiana, a region whose economy has been tied to oil and gas and whose land is physically disappearing. Building on a former Exxon site is an unusually literal succession.

The jobs figures deserve the usual scepticism applied to economic development announcements, since ten-year projections made at the point of announcement are forecasts rather than commitments. They are also the numbers on which any state incentives would be justified.

Coastal erosion is also the environmental question the project has to answer. SpaceX says it is partnering with state and federal agencies to expand Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan and will work with wildlife agencies on ecological impacts, which is the right vocabulary but not yet a commitment with a number attached.

The Texas Starbase provides the relevant precedent, and it is a mixed one. Launches there have involved debris, wildlife impacts, and repeated regulatory scrutiny, and Vermilion Parish sits in wetlands far more sensitive than the south Texas coast.

Local reaction has not been uniform either. Coastal parishes have long experience of large industrial projects arriving with employment promises, and the fishing and wetland interests in the area have their own view of what a launch complex means for them.

What the second site fundamentally buys is launch cadence. Starship’s economics depend on flying often, and a single pad complex in Texas caps how often that can happen regardless of how well the vehicle performs.

The vehicle is the part still to be proven. SpaceX has spent over $8bn on Starship and flown 13 test flights since 2023, and full reusability, the property the entire business case rests on, has not yet been demonstrated in operation.

Committing $100bn to launch infrastructure before that milestone is either conviction or a very expensive way to express optimism. Musk has been consistent that Starship is meant to carry a great deal more than satellites, including factories on the Moon and orbital compute.

There is also a national security dimension that goes unmentioned in the announcements. A second launch complex removes a single point of failure from a system the Pentagon and NASA increasingly depend on, which is an argument that tends to help with federal permitting.

Regulatory approvals have not been granted, and a spaceport in Louisiana wetlands will require federal environmental review that takes years rather than months. The 2027 construction date assumes a process that has not started publicly yet.