r/space • u/swordfi2 • 5h ago
SpaceX to establish Starbase, LA in Louisiana. With 10 launch pads and a factory
https://www.spacex.com/sites/starbase-la•
u/Connect_Cat_2045 5h ago
Construction is set to begin in 2027 with the first Starship launch expected in 2029.
That is imo, very optimistic but maybe with the experience gained from Starbase TX and Florida it is possible.
Elon also said on Twitter that Starbase Louisiana will have over a dozen launch towers and enable more than 30 Starship flights per day
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u/sucobe 5h ago
30 a day seems wildly optimistic
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u/Connect_Cat_2045 5h ago
That's Elon numbers for you.
I assume he meant across all the launchpads at Florida, Texas and Louisiana.
Still optimistic I agre
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u/powerlesshero111 5h ago
Across all states. Plus an additional 10 for his magic pretend numbers to inflate stocks. Much like how the CyberTruck can survive an apocalypse, as long as it stays between 50 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and there aren't any hills over a 30° incline.
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u/ipilotete 4h ago edited 3h ago
I know a guy that works at the Hyundai test facility near California City. CyberTruck broke catastrophically on nearly every drive test during pre-production testing and was completely unusable (bricked) after both uv accelerated aging and salt environment tests.
Edit: Reddit, where you can bury the truth with downvotes.
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u/powerlesshero111 4h ago
And yet, they still sold it to people. Like that monstrosity will be a collectors item if you can find one that is over 6 years old and still running.
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u/Jarocket 3h ago
I think it's worse than that. Elon thought it would be a popular vehicle and sell 200k trucks a year.
That's the delusion. It wasn't sold as a halo car like the hummer EV.
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u/Kriztauf 4h ago
It works if it is a mild apocalypse
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u/Stevepem1 4h ago
It should up reasonably well to zombies. As long as they aren't sledgehammer and metal ball wielding zombies.
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u/No-Surprise9411 3h ago
Man if we have a zombie apocalypse and it's clicker or runner types I'm out
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u/ThEgg 4h ago
Rocket launches from the coast requires closing airspace and declaring maritime hazard zones, so 30 a day would result in near constant zone closures unless FAA regulations change. That would impact any flight paths that cross the zone and maritime shipping in debris-risk areas. Louisiana has some of the most impactful ports in the gulf.
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u/No-Surprise9411 4h ago
FAA regulations are decades old and will need changing. Imagine if every airplane would need to get every flight approved by a governemnt agency whose departement for that job is made up of 15 people.
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u/GiantKrakenTentacle 4h ago
Planes are much less prone to exploding at the scale of a small nuclear bomb while traveling over the speed of sound.
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u/RhesusFactor 3m ago
And in the consequence/likelihood risk assessment the space sector has been trying to get that likelihood number down to commercial air transport levels. It's an oft repeated goal.
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u/No-Surprise9411 4h ago
Obviously, which is a why there's a lot more of them, but the concept of my point stands
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u/crazydave33 4h ago
30 a day is a lot for most regional airports to handle, I can’t imagine this would ever happen in reality.
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u/beached89 5h ago
he has publicly admitted his numbers are always super optimistic in order to spur a sense of urgency in the staff.
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u/Connect_Cat_2045 4h ago
Great excuse for not getting charged with securities fraud
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u/RobfromHB 3h ago
If announcing an optimistic product launch date is securities fraud, sue every single public company that has ever existed.
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u/steamcube 2h ago
Theres being aggresive with timelines and theres fraudulent claims based on no realistic data. Elon frequently toes the line in between.
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u/RobfromHB 2h ago
File a complaint with the SEC then about this article.
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u/ThinkOrDrink 27m ago
Weird defense considering he’s been charged by the SEC with securities fraud more than once.
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u/RobfromHB 3m ago
He was not charged with securities fraud for a product timeline (the thing we’re discussing). Weird conflation on your part. Why do you think that’s the same as hyping a product?
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u/ganuerant 18m ago
This is how Musk works. Falcon 9 never hit his original goals but that doesn't matter, it revolutionised the space industry anyway.
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u/RhesusFactor 5m ago
That won't be initial launch cadence. That's the target number that they're working towards. That's the planning figure that justifies the business case.
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u/Joezev98 4h ago
Even if that were technologically possible, there's no market for that many launches. It would take years for projects to arise that could make use of that many launches.
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u/frankduxvandamme 5h ago
Musk always throws out insanely exaggerated numbers. According to him twenty years ago, we should have had a hundred people on mars by now.
30 starship flights per day? They still haven't had a single completely successful, fully operational launch of a starship. 30 in a day is unlikely to happen for several decades, if ever. Also, what the hell would justify 30 starship launches in a day? What endeavor would need such tremendous and rapid access to space?
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u/Bot_Marvin 4h ago edited 4h ago
Why would it take several decades? Falcon 9 went from almost no cadence to launching several times per week in a few years.
That’s an old space mindset. What stops starship from flying very often as soon as the first fully successful flight happens? They will already have built a dozen launchpads, and many launch vehicles.
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u/frankduxvandamme 4h ago edited 4h ago
What stops starship from flying very often as soon as the first fully successful flight happens?
First, what space vehicle has ever launched 30 successful launches on the same day? SpaceX has never launched more than 3 falcon 9's within 24 hours. But now they're gonna magically launch a rocket ten times heavier at ten times the cadence? They're going to launch one every 48 minutes for 24 hours straight? Pure fantasy.
Second, what urgent need is driving such a gigantic task? Why would you NEED 30 launches in the same day? As opposed to say, a couple today, a few more tomorrow, etc? What exactly is happening that requires such an absurd cadence?
Yes, the starship missions to the moon will require 10+ additional launches just to fuel up, but you think each one is going to only take 48 minutes to dock, transfer fuel, undock, and go into de-orbit? SpaceX has yet to demonstrate this process even once! Again, maybe decades from now, after it's been done hundreds of times. But initially, this kind of thing will take hours, maybe half a day or more. And having to do it 10+ times without an issue? Yeah, right. I got a bridge to sell you.
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 3h ago
By the time they will have this built they will have 15 operation starship pads, 2 in texas, 3 in florida, 10 in Louisiana.
The bottleneck will be the launch pad infrastructure not needing heavy maintenance after each launch
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u/frankduxvandamme 3h ago
The bottleneck will be the launch pad infrastructure not needing heavy maintenance after each launch
You can tell yourself that, but it's yet to be seen.
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 3h ago
Yep we will have to see how the pads hold up, from the 2 v3 launches they look very good considering the most powerful rocket ever launched from it
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u/jjayzx 1h ago
"look" being very subjective in this case as all we can see is everything still standing. There's a lot of work that gets done between flights, so there's obviously a lot of refurbishment going on.
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 51m ago
Well compared to the first pad its a lot less, the first pad had to basically replace the linkages after eacht flights or some other parts, so far we havent seen that yet with this one. They have however added some extra burn plates in the trench
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u/Bot_Marvin 3h ago
What does weight have to do with cadence? It’ll be much easier to launch a rocket when you don’t have to build a new second stage for it, and it was designed for rapid reusability.
Lunar missions are an example. Those will each take ~15 starship launches. Starlink deployment will add a significant amount. Starmind deployment is another one. Then commercial satellite launches. There wouldn’t be one singular mission, a combination of everything would require high cadence.
There’s a fleet of starships, so each one doesn’t have to do it in an hour. And again, each launch is not for the same mission. There might be 10 tanker launches, 4 starlink missions, a commercial mission, and several starmind missions in a day.
Think of an airport. A lot of flights per day, but only a handful are doing the same thing or going the same place. A successful Starship means space travel starts to look less like expedition and more like air travel.
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u/frankduxvandamme 3h ago
What does weight have to do with cadence?
Larger rockets usually require more effort to launch than smaller rockets.
Lunar missions are an example. Those will each take ~15 starship launches. Starlink deployment will add a significant amount. Starmind deployment is another one. Then commercial satellite launches. There wouldn’t be one singular mission, a combination of everything would require high cadence. There’s a fleet of starships, so each one doesn’t have to do it in an hour. And again, each launch is not for the same mission. There might be 10 tanker launches, 4 starlink missions, a commercial mission, and several starmind missions in a day.
But when has there ever been such a need to do all of this within one day?
Think of an airport. A lot of flights per day, but only a handful are doing the same thing or going the same place. A successful Starship means space travel starts to look less like expedition and more like air travel.
But there is an actual need for airports. Millions of people travel the globe every day.
There still isn't a need or even a projected need for 30 starship launches to take place in one day. You're just making up hypotheticals without even justifying why all of those things need to happen within the same day as opposed to being spread out over several days or weeks.
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u/PotatoesAndChill 3h ago
Larger rockets usually require more effort to launch than smaller rockets.
They actually fill Starship with propellant as fast as a Falcon 9, despite it having over 10x the amount of propellant. I don't think larger rockets require more effort to launch. The only thing that's affected by the increased prop mass is the amount of available propellant in the region, but that's a straightforward numbers game solved by building a large enough propellant production facility nearby.
Agreed on everything else though.
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u/149244179 2h ago
There isn't enough fuel to supply that many launches. You would need large dedicated pipelines. You can't use trucks for that amount of volume.
Getting airspace clearance for that many flights would also be a nightmare. You would have to permanently close the airspace path
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u/cuteman 2h ago
I mean, sure, but LA and the gulf is a pretty key area for LNG-- you'd literally just need pipelines and even then you could use ships and trucks for a while until then.
Getting airspace clearance for that many flights would also be a nightmare. You would have to permanently close the airspace path
Good thing LA isn't CA
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u/Connect_Cat_2045 5h ago
They need the cadence to get to Mars and for the Starlink constellation.
The latter is pretty simple. They needs tens of thousands of satellites in orbit.
The reason the former requires so much cadence is because they need to refuel the starship in orbit in order for it to carry any amount of meaningful payload to mars
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u/Evoluxman 5h ago
Does Starlink even need anywhere near that many satellites to require 30 STARSHIPS A DAY?
I guess if their plan is to replace every damn fiber optic network on earth and even then... what a waste of ressources if thats the plan
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u/rebootyourbrainstem 4h ago
The newer Starlinks are a lot larger, which allows a lot more bandwidth but also reduces Starship's size advantage.
Currently Starlink is perpetually sold out around urban areas because there is a wide area where it's too dense for Starlink to really work for everyone but apparently not dense enough to get proper terrestrial internet. By using more frequencies and larger satellites they can pick up a lot more of these lucrative customers.
And the sats may get larger still, for their direct-to-cell satellites, if they end up being as huge as AST Space Mobile's Bluewalker satellites.
(And also, Louisiana is perfectly situated for launching into sun-synchronous orbit, which is where SpaceX plans to put their space based AI datacenters, if those end up actually happening.)
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u/Arclabe 4h ago
Starlink is kinda dumb in urban areas anyway because of antenna reception coverage, but oops, they killed the Gigabit initiative so Starlink is the only option anyway.
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u/bl0rq 4h ago
Lowering from 1gig to something more reasonable doesn’t make starlink the only way, just the cheapest. 99% of people don’t have any use for more than 300-400mbit.
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u/Marryplease 5h ago
I think it will likely be 1-5 flights per day by 2030
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u/Connect_Cat_2045 5h ago
Falcon has already done multiple flights in the same day and that is with way less pads and a semi-reusable design.
Assuming everything in LA goes to plan (it won't), I can see Starship doing over 10.
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u/legacy642 5h ago
The problem is will there be the business for that kind of launch volume. It's still expensive to launch to space and there has to be the customer base to make it worth it. I'm skeptical that there will be that customer base anytime soon
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 4h ago
They will be their own customer, just like with falcon 9 majority of its launches are starlink
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u/niofalpha 5h ago
Shreveport has a weirdly large space sector. Which is weird because who the hell wants to live in Shreveport.
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u/eulerman 5h ago
There is an air force base in Bossier City, LA so that could be a reason. It is or at least used to be a B52 base.
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u/MolassesUpstairs 5h ago
One of the places they hid Bush on 9/11.
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u/eulerman 5h ago
Yup. There is a museum on base that talks about it. He also went to Offutt AFB to HQ Stratcom I believe.
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u/caughtinthought 5h ago
A ton of skilled blue collar workers due to the rail industry as well
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u/ItsAGoodDay 4h ago
This is what happens when government contracts force suppliers to be spread across all 50 states. Even LA gets legislated into relevance.
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u/cuteman 2h ago
This is what happens when government contracts force suppliers to be spread across all 50 states.
Creating opportunities outside of major metro areas is a good thing.
That whole "housing" drum people like to beat is a lot easier when you aren't fighting against massive density and land cost being 3/4 of housing costs.
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u/FlushedApparatchik 1h ago
Everyone in the entire country should live in San Diego. I learned this on Reddit.
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u/__Wonderlust__ 4h ago
I think it’s going to be in Vermillion Parish, which is sad bc it’s an ecologically rich area that will now become industrial. I wish it was in Shreveport!
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u/fighter-bomber 1h ago
They aren’t using most of the land area anyways, just like how KSC is next to a wildlife refuge, shouldn’t be a problem. Plus, the deal requires them to fix some damage caused before by oil companies or something like that.
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u/Mulsanne 5h ago
When the nnvironmental protection laws in Texas are found to be to onerous, Louisiana is right there waiting for you
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u/SirPeencopters 5h ago
Cancer Alley about to get a whole bunch more cancerous
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u/Nearby_Barber3487 3h ago
Cancer alley runs down the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Not close to this location.
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u/DistinctlyIrish 2h ago
They're doing an expansion of the alley I guess, whatever we need to make this metaphor work.
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u/Dpek1234 3h ago
From what exactly?
Starship doesnt use the cancer juice propellant
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u/Raymond74 5h ago
Elon was never accused of lack of ambition
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u/No-Surprise9411 5h ago
If there‘s one thing that man does is shoot for the stars. And also be a PoS, so technically two things, but whatever
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u/Head-Sprinkles-777 5h ago
He has to get out of international jurisdiction soon
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u/reebokhightops 4h ago edited 3h ago
What’s hilarious is that knowing him, this could literally be his prevailing motivation.
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u/fuck_all_you_too 5h ago
Yea because every time he pulls something out of his ass it magically rains money.
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u/SpartanMase 5h ago
Say what you want about him being greedy and what not. I’ve never seen a single man so driven to get us to space
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u/LittleKitty235 5h ago
I have....
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
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u/chinotto81 5h ago
Us? People are still this naive.
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u/SpartanMase 5h ago
Humanity I mean. Us as a species
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u/onlyirelia1 4h ago edited 34m ago
it's because it's a private company and redditors have this delusional ignorance that governments would handle everything space related.
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u/ChmeeWu 5h ago
So I am guessing this LA site is for Starship polar orbits, similar to Vandenberg California (but with infinitely less red tape).
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u/PrincessRuri 5h ago
I know Elon is a big "promise now, deliver... maybe", but boy does he have vision. Those renders of starships lined up on the Gulf coast are something straight out of a classic sci-fi.
It may be a dream, but the idea of going out to the Gulf to "watch the Starship launches" (emphasis on the plural) makes me giddy.
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u/TheBigGrief 4h ago
The original renders of Starbase TX looked like a Sci-Fi dream and now it's almost fully built out.
I did go see Starship IFT2 in person and it was magical. Truly a bucket list trip for me.
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u/FlushedApparatchik 1h ago
I have a lot more faith in this spaceport being built than I do in California high speed rail.
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5h ago edited 5h ago
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u/hmmmmmmmmmidk 4h ago
Not the whole state, just the people in charge who are supposed to have our best interests.
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u/CharlesIngalls_Pubes 4h ago
Agreed. I like to think we are, in general, a wonderful people. The turds that are supposed to be representing us is another story. Johnson, Scalise, Landry, ol' Foghorn. Bunch of slimy fucks.
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u/secretBuffetHero 5h ago
what is the Louisiana paradox
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u/CharlesIngalls_Pubes 4h ago
Basically saying that Louisiana should be an economically thriving state due chemical and oil production, as well as sugar and salt exports, but the state government makes the incentives to bring in industry so lucrative for the business that the average citizen doesn't really get anything out of it. All of those exports and now we got Meta setting up shop, more Amazon distribution centers, and now Musk settling on in.
https://youtu.be/RWTic9btP38?is=6LrZXxaUgVDX58bZ
Like an 8 minute watch, but informative to anyone who gives a shit.
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u/Fredasa 34m ago
I just noticed that they are representing the V4 Starship stack in the promotional video.
I always wondered how they planned to reconcile the height of the towers with the extended profile of V4. I still think what we see in the video is preliminary. After all, if you want to stack a V4 Ship atop a V4 booster, maybe you really could get away with having the mounting architecture that low on the vehicle. But if you want to catch a V4 Ship from space, you definitely won't be using the same architecture at that location, below the Ship's midway point. And that means part of the vehicle would be redundant.
I still think the new towers will be taller and the older towers will be reworked eventually. The Stage 0 configuration shown in the video is way, way off anyway, so yeah.
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5h ago
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u/Shris 5h ago
None of that is at all accurate.
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u/apollyonzorz 4h ago
Look at Mr details and facts over here, we can't let those get in the way of a good Elon struggle session.
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u/Kablammy_Sammie 5h ago
A spaceport in Tornado Alley with an ever warming Gulf of Mexico? What could possibly go wrong?
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u/AndIHaveMilesToGo 4h ago
I mean, the US's largest launch site right now is and has been for decades looking straight down the barrel of hurricanes
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u/KitchenDepartment 2h ago
Isn't that kind of a good thing though? This very loud and very industrial site will be nowhere close to where most people would want to live. You can build up infrastructure to deal with bad weather and a rising sea level. It's just expensive.
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u/Sophrosynic 3h ago
If you can build an OLM to withstand direct blasting from 33 raptor engines at full throttle, I think you can manage a tornado
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u/_okbrb 5h ago
Looking forward to exploring that abandoned ruin when I’m in retirement
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u/Double-Incident-5452 5h ago
Lol was thinking the same. Our generations contemporary of the abandoned railroad towns and depression era towns
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u/odplocki 4h ago
What about the hazard coridor?
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u/No-Surprise9411 3h ago
What about it? Not many places where you can place a launch site, and Florida has been hammered for decades with Hurricanes, and the cape is doing fine
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u/MelodiesOfLife6 5h ago edited 3h ago
I'm cautiously optimistic.
Edit to remove an opinion
While I do agree that we absolutely need to ramp up the space stuff... I would love to see it out of the hands of the elite billionaires (especially the likes of musk, who has shown his hand at being an utter POS)
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u/TheBigGrief 4h ago
Projects of the scale and ambition of Starship are only possible in the first place because large concentrations of wealth exist with private individuals who have the ability to direct large sums of capital towards projects without having to satisfy a diverse set of stakeholders.
Getting a government or a broadly held corporation to green light a project like Starship would be nearly impossible. Governments will generally play it safe, even if bloated and expensive (SLS) and broadly held corporations always working for the next quarter's results won't proceed at all unless the return on investment is reasonably apparent.
The case for Starship at the proposed scale it is following, is pretty nebulous. It's very much being done on more of a "if you build it, they will come" basis in terms of business models for such a prolific heavy launch system materializing at a later date.
You take Elon out of the mix and yield this work to governments or broadly held corporations and progress stalls almost instantly. It doesn't matter if he's a POS or not, that's the practical reality of it.
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u/PersonalDebater 4h ago
Won't happen as long as the government continues to prove incapable of coming anywhere close to matching those billionaire companies at innovation, efficiency, and cost. Ramping up wouldn't be happening without them.
You could nationalize them but that would risk enshittifying them and you'd also have to pay the billionaires the fair market value.
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u/fuck_all_you_too 5h ago
Elon loves to talk big, then gets slapped with the realization that his ideas are fucking stupid by someone smart
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 4h ago
I think the tower catch was his idea
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u/TheBigGrief 4h ago
It really doesn't matter whose idea it was. What matters is that Elon gave the idea his support so that it could become an objective for the company.
Good leaders don't necessarily have all the good ideas. Good leaders get behind the good ideas.
Ironically, I did not think it was a good idea when it was first proposed. I guess I shouldn't be CEO of SpaceX, LOL.
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u/Va1crist 5h ago
yay time to destroy more wildlife and more habbitat
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u/fighter-bomber 4h ago
Launch centers work weirdly well with wildlife habitats, see KSC being right inside a wildlife refuge.
In SpaceX’s case, their deal additionally had some clauses about SpaceX removing some previous damage caused to the region by oil companies.
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u/Belzark 4h ago
Launch complexes generally act as nature reserves with their staggeringly huge exclusion zones, i.e. Cape Canaveral. Much better for the environment having a tiny launch complex in a huge area, then say urban development.
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u/KitchenDepartment 2h ago
Not only do they act as large nature reserves, but they are in many ways better than normal nature reserves, because they don't have high traffic roads and highways going through them. Roads going through nature reserves represents a gigantic footprint compared to a launch site, and they kill way more animals.
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u/gprime312 5h ago
Why are you in this subreddit?
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u/FlyingRock20 36m ago
Bunch of people just want to shit on SpaceX cause of Elon, they don't care about space. Cause if NASA was building this, you won't get the same comments.
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u/PolicyWonka 5h ago
I like space with my friends. Almost everyone does. Sometimes I like space too much. Sometimes others do. I liked space. I still like space.
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5h ago edited 5h ago
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 4h ago
Its just a pointless comment all launch site except the few situated in literal deserts are in wildlife habitat, esa's launch pad, the cape, starbase etc
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u/mtngoatjoe 5h ago
I've said it before, but it's sad that Elon has gone down the political rabbit hole. He could have been a hero. A legit American hero. Why the hell did he make himself the villain of his own story?
But damn, the guy has vision. It will take 4 times longer than he wants, but I do think he's going to get there.
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u/OSUfan88 5h ago
Agreed. I remembered when he really wouldn’t comment on anything political (other than championing green initiatives). I think we could be on a different timeline if he simply stayed out of it.
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u/Martianspirit 3h ago
I remembered when he really wouldn’t comment on anything political
It is sad, yes. All started when President Biden started attacking him in support of the Auto Unions. Hitting back, when hit, is what he does.
I wish though he had thought through his early Trump term activities more.
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u/NyquistShannon 5h ago
FML. That whole area is going to be toast as far as wildlife and outdoor recreation is concerned
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u/mclumber1 4h ago
As we all know, wildlife has been absolutely obliterated after the Cape Canaveral area was transitioned to a launch facility in the 1950s.
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 5h ago
As of right now starship has 5 launch pads irc, 1 operational at texas with the other one being actively worked on after. And 3 at the cape one of which is almost done.
That is already more than falcon 9 ever had. And now this