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Starbase, LA
- chasd00 1mo agoMan if this actually starts to happen it's a good time to be a welder, concrete worker, or any general contractor or tradesman in Louisiana. Coastal Louisiana is some of the poorest areas in the US even more so than the valley in Texas where Starbase Texas is located. Probably 10-20 years worth of solid work building out that site.
- swingandamiss 1mo agoA lot of good, hard working people in that area that would love to have these jobs open up.
- ActorNightly 1mo ago[flagged]
- pinkmuffinere 1mo agosomewhat topical video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3dSjY4j7Ak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3dSjY4j7Ak tl;dw -- louisiana has a ton of natural resources and wonderful harbors, but has allowed corporations to get away with almost anything without paying their fair share of taxes, cleaning up their waste, or generally being held accountable. And likely related, there is a long history of rampant corruption in the area. With sea levels rising and cancerous pollution filling densely populated areas, life in Louisiana has generally become very difficult :(
- gammarator 1mo agoThe book “Strangers in Their Own Land” covers similar ground.
- pstuart 1mo ago> but has allowed corporations to get away with almost anything without paying their fair share of taxes No doubt one of the more compelling reasons for SpaceX to do it there (along with their given reasoning).
- jpleyden98 1mo agoI haven't had time to watch the video but my understanding was a lot of the Louisiana coast have big problems with rising sea levels and much of it in the process of falling underwater. Perhaps it's relatively trivial to reinforce the coast for the forseeable I don't know. The plans for the site involve extracting significant amounts of natural gas to make methane to burn for the rocket fuel. If they hit the launch levels they suggest (thousands of launches per year), this is not a small amount of greenhouse gases they'll be emitting which of course helps accelerate melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels, which could threaten the very site they've built it on.
- timschmidt 1mo agoThey're also the folks working on the largest co2 -> methane converters in the world. Because that's how they'll need to make fuel on Mars, and no one else on earth wants to fund an expensive technology to replace an inexpensive gas pumped from the ground. By definition, these reactors will have to be capable of producing enough fuel for a rocket in order to be fit for purpose. That opens the door for carbon neutral operation. It's tough to imagine a greener rocket than a fully reusable one that's carbon neutral running on methane. Sure beats spewing hypergolics or solid rocket fuels.
- tantalor 1mo agoReminds me of Africa in terms of resource exploitation and lack of re-investment.
- gchamonlive 1mo agoWhat are the chances they'll employ cheap labor they can just use as election fodder for stealing hard-working american jobs? Either that or pay decent wages for American workers that'll drive up construction prices and worsen the inflation which is already crazy due to these criminal tariffs.
- timschmidt 1mo agoITAR requires them to employ US citizens.
- rayiner 1mo agoITAR proves it’s possible to have immigration enforcement.
- throwaway2037 1mo agoTo be clear, ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) restricts certain roles to "US persons". This is a weird term in US immigration/nationality law. A permanent resident (green-card holder) is classified as a "US person". As a result, SpaceX can employ non-US citizens for ITAR regulated roles.
- inemesitaffia 1mo agoSpaceX avoids hiring foreigners . Just like some companies/facilities only hire cleared people. Even though it may not be required.
- jtbayly 1mo agoSo no matter what they do, you blame them? If they pay not enough, they are bad, if they pay enough, they are also bad. Ok.
- gchamonlive 1mo agoThey put themselves in that situation, the US admin, not me. I'm just commenting. Or is any of what I said wrong? I mean there's something called ITAR that requires American workers, but that doesn't mean the impact on inflation isn't real
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- sigmoid10 1mo agoIf the figures in this announcement hold up, they're gonna spend like $20k per resident of LA. That's insane.
- ryandvm 1mo agoLol. I can't imaging the figures from a Musk venture not holding up.
- maxlin 1mo agoMany said that about Starlink too. Impossible to send so many rockets up. Till it isn't.
- estearum 1mo agoCould you find a source of someone saying this?
- TMWNN 1mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W676Kk9LSYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W676Kk9LSYw
- estearum 1mo agoDid you watch the video? This person didn't say it was impossible to launch enough satellites for Starlink. He said the Falcon 1 launch price of $5MM was unrealistic, which ended up being correct. At the time, Falcon 1 was supposed to launch 600kg for $5MM. It ended up launching 420kg for $9MM. $8k/kg to $21k/kg. Now obviously there's always a lot of doubt and skepticism around SpaceX, but you can just say "people said this would be really hard but they did it." Or you can say "Musk set a goal to 4x performance and got to an also-remarkable 3x" or whatever. Even in this video, the smug Ariane guy heaps a decent amount of praise upon SpaceX and what they've achieved. He just said a $5MM launch will not be one of those things, and he was correct.
- whyage 1mo agoAre "3,000 new jobs" enough to make a dent though?
- chasd00 1mo agoit doesn't fix everything wrong in the state but it's > 0. There's a lot of additional economic activity that comes with the construction too. Restaurants get busier, Walmart gets busier, lots of auto repair/servicing will be needed etc. Som e people will move for construction and end up staying there. It can be a shock to the local communities though but i think the positives still outweigh the negatives.
- rtkwe 1mo agoThe biggest issue is these kinds of construction jobs are temporary. It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over. Starbase will require more people on site at least.
- chasd00 1mo agoyeah but that site is huge, that's a multi-decade construction project.
- oceanplexian 1mo agoThe construction is temporary but what are the economic impacts of having a fully operational spaceport that launches 20,000% more tonnage to orbit than the Florida Space Coast? Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.
- Noaidi 1mo agoYou mean the negative economic impacts?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- mrtksn 1mo agoUnless of course Musk decides to use the opportunity to advertise Optimus, be it with actually AI able to do it or teleoperator do it.
- VanTheBrand 1mo agoOptimus would have to work well enough in the near future for that not gonna happen
- nodesocket 1mo agoOptimus ins’t gonna be a master welder, electrician, HVAC technician, general contractor anytime soon.
- bdamm 1mo agoDebatable. Optimus will be programmed by watching thousands of YouTube videos and by indexing the entire NEC. It is entirely possible that a single Optimus can be a master welder, electrician, and HVAC technician. What Optimus can't do is take responsibility for the completion of the work as being done to code. Nor is it clear how much Optimus will cost to buy or operate. Underestimating humanoid capabilities is a mistake; the real challenge will be the economics and the flow of responsibility. But imagine a future where every structure built has a pov video documenting its construction. I don't like the implication for the trades any more than I like the implication of Claude for putting me out of work either.
- dmitriy_ko 1mo agoLatest LLMs that have good visual understanding (Gemini and GPT) are able to tell if construction work is up to code. You can give it a picture of electrical wiring, plumbing, framing and it will tell you if it's up to code with very good accuracy.
- imtringued 1mo agoOk, but if you think that's true, then it would be a huge mistake to put Optimus on two legs instead of a boom lift.
- utopiah 1mo agoHmmm is it though? Quite a few articles like https://futurism.com/future-society/elon-musk-stiffing-contractors-on-huge-bills https://futurism.com/future-society/elon-musk-stiffing-contr... make me think they better ask to be paid upfront.
- s1artibartfast 1mo agoWhile workers are rarely paid up front, two week pay interval is pretty common
- bix6 1mo agodid we read the same article? The link above says nothing about pay period but does list hundreds of millions unpaid.
- fastball 1mo agohundreds of millions unpaid and zero investigative journalism to try to get at the truth, besides "liens filed therefore Elon Musk is a cheapskate".
- bix6 1mo agoSo you think multiple contractors in multiple states are just filing liens for fun?
- s1artibartfast 1mo agoAnything at scale will have payment disputes. Did the work happen, was it for contract, did it run over? These types of questions are extremely common
- bix6 1mo agoRight so the article says they aren’t paying but should be. Do you have evidence to suggest otherwise?
- chews 1mo agoIs 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-cybertruck-production-is-now-officially-a-hostage-situation-45135946 https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/cars/tesla/tesla-cybertruc...
- vessenes 1mo agoThat…is the opposite of the facts reported in that story you linked.
- porridgeraisin 1mo agoArticles are mostly a prompt for people
- aksss 1mo agoIncremental 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.
- officeplant 1mo ago>Start cheering on successes. Sure, when success stops being the environmental destruction of every area he sets up shop in for SpaceX launches.
- inglor_cz 1mo agoIs it realistic to demand a spaceport with no environmental impact from anyone, SpaceX or not? Current launch technology inevitably produces a lot of heat and noise and we don't have any rocket model that wouldn't at least rarely fail (and explode). That said, extant Cape Canaveral does not seem to be lifeless. Lots of birds. IDK how the precise species composition has changed since 1960, but nature as a whole is a lot more resilient than people seem to think.
- rayiner 1mo agoYeah that’s just a fig leaf. I bet you can’t even name all the other places that have launch sites.
- Zigurd 1mo agoGo Solar City! Wait...
- thegrim33 1mo agoThe doomerism has two primary sources: 1) Political - The ideology/party spreading the doomerism promotes that they're the ones that can "fix it", if only you vote for them. 2) Adversarial countries, primarily China - Using the internet to convince members of western civilization to hate their civilization, hate their economic system, hate their history, hate their compatriots, adopt a no motivation defeatist attitude, etc., etc., and they can get our population to destroy itself from within without having to go to war with us. Reject the doomerism, reject the negativity. Build. Invent. Create. Do your part to contribute to your civilization, to contribute to humanity, to move us forwards.
- notesinthefield 1mo agoI 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.
- SoftTalker 1mo agoOne thing about construction trades is that they will hire apprentices. Someone needs to do the grunt work, and they learn on the job (or in class if they are union) and eventually become productive or wash out.
- swozey 1mo agoThese guys have been popping up on my instagram bragging about how much money they're making building DCs and any argument they get between their "Im making $350k/week, what're you getting, lib?!" is defended with "Well all your instagram comments are stored in datacenters, and you didn't cry then!" They have no idea what they're actually building, of course. I just love the comparison of a webhost/telco pop to Manhattan sized gigadcs that require nuclear power plants or blasting gas furnaces.
- throwaway2037 1mo ago> even more so than the valley in Texas where Starbase Texas is located. Are you saying that Brownsville, Texas (closest city to Starbase Texas) is poor? Not at all.
- inemesitaffia 1mo agoThe county was one of the poorest in Texas
- BugsJustFindMe 1mo ago> Building a new space coast But are they building it ghost to ghost?
- giancarlostoro 1mo agoLol 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Coast
- jakeydus 1mo agoOh, I've never thought that Florida was uninteresting. Florida is nothing but ~interesting~.
- giancarlostoro 1mo agoI'm sort of projecting (I've been here most of my life, I got tired of it, now regaining appreciation for Florida the last few years), but I've also noticed others (not you) don't realize there's more to Florida than most people realize.
- FeloniousHam 1mo agoI grew up in South Florida (not a native), and my experience of strip malls and ever widening highways is: if there was a state below Florida, that's where the desperate and unrooted migrants would have kept driving to. I spent my childhood fishing in a swimsuit every day I could. I loved it. But as an adult, any south of Ocala and east of Gainesville is a cultural wasteland (with cutouts for Miami and Tampa).
- GenerWork 1mo agoRead "Building a new space coast" and I immediately wondered what our elected officials here in Florida must have felt when they saw that line. I'd love for SpaceX to greatly expand their presence here in Florida, but at the same time the coast is probably too built up here for SpaceX to have a facility like that unless they go into the panhandle.
- 1auralynn 1mo agoI mean, isn't the LA coast going to be underwater in 50 years?
- nxm 1mo agoNope
- stronglikedan 1mo ago[dead]
- cwal37 1mo agoI wonder if anyone read the copy on this page or if it mostly came out of an LLM. The "Restoring the shoreline" and Rebuilding the marshlands" paragraphs below the images are almost exactly the same. The first sentence is exactly the same.
- schiffern 1mo agoFor 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.
- beerandt 1mo agoMaybe, 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).
- cwal37 1mo agoI did briefly consider something along those lines, but shoreline and marshlands are materially different, plus they've already changed the text.
- bobchadwick 1mo agoMaybe the site developer saw your comment. They're different now.
- ceroxylon 1mo agoGood thing the internet never forgets: https://web.archive.org/web/20260825163906/https://www.spacex.com/sites/starbase-la https://web.archive.org/web/20260825163906/https://www.space...
- ramesh31 1mo agoAh, Louisiana — when even Texas won't let you pollute enough.
- syndacks 1mo agohttps://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-shocking-hazards-of-louisianas-cancer-alley https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-shocking-hazards-of-lo...
- TripleTree 1mo agoCan't launch south out of Texas
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- vel0city 1mo agoSure you can. There's a lot of Texas coastline.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- kemotep 1mo agoIt’s hard to imagine that Cocoa Beach/Titusville isn’t receptive to this. I guess it’s probably cheaper? They don’t have to share the airspace with NASA and other launch companies and it becomes a fully owned and operated Freeport for Musk’s ventures.
- jauntywundrkind 1mo agoSeems 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.
- chasd00 1mo ago> 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.
- randallsquared 1mo agoThey may not have to ship many or any. The first launch of a Texas-constructed Starship could just land the booster in Louisiana for a small fuel penalty, and then ships could likewise land there.
- officeplant 1mo ago> It would help lift a lot of people in that area out of poverty. It's not gonna help us do shit. It will line the pockets of the usual wealthy Louisiana oil barons and politicians similar to the Meta Datacenter that got backed door approved by our politicians.
- kulahan 1mo agoCrazy how they’ll get you to work for free, but I guess that’s your prerogative. Most people charge for their labor, and money > no money, even if the money you do receive wasn’t equally distributed.
- timcobb 1mo agoWhy does this need to be built on the beach?
- stronglikedan 1mo agoPresumably so rockets can get out over water as quickly as possible in case they fail.
- jgdxno 1mo agoit is to ensure that nothing fall on people's heads
- block_dagger 1mo agoSo the (eastward) flight path isn't over populated land. Rapid disassembly and all that.
- Tuna-Fish 1mo agoIn this case, southward.
- Tuna-Fish 1mo agoBecause 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.
- 1mo ago
- MeetingsBrowser 1mo ago> Starbase, Louisiana will be built to support thousands of Starship flights a year. This self-sustaining spaceport will have propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport. Sounds really neat, but "incredibly ambitious announcement" from an Elon Musk company is starting to wear thin. Is this real, or will it join the graveyard of other incredibly ambitious projects that were eventually abandoned to focus on the next incredibly ambitious project.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- bhelkey 1mo agoHe 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-launched-into-outer-space https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
- MeetingsBrowser 1mo agoSpaceX and Tesla are both successful companies doing really impressive things, but the more ambitious claims are almost always silently discarded. Including robotaxis, tesla semi-trucks, hyperloop, optimus, roadster 2.0, cheap whole home batteries, true FSD, Mars landing, nueralink, and more I'm sure. It is difficult for me to get excited about a decades long, ambitious project when the follow through rate is <10%.
- randallsquared 1mo agoSeveral of these do exist already, and one of them was never a promised project. This objection seems like it's from 2016.
- mindwok 1mo agoHe is definitely overly optimistic on timelines but pretty much all those things you mentioned are actually still happening, it's too early to say they haven't followed through.
- mrtnmcc 1mo agoA way to get back at Texas for datacenter restrictions? Ten pads and thousands of flights per year sure will accelerate Golden Dome, err... I mean "going to Mars"
- zoomaboom 1mo agoSpaceX just got $8B more for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- inemesitaffia 1mo agoThat's just not true
- randallsquared 1mo agoTerrestrial 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.
- bpodgursky 1mo agoIt's not a zero sum market, supply is nowhere near meeting demand, in the short term restrictions also hurt SpaceX because they are building out their own terrestrial datacenters in Memphis etc.
- thrance 1mo agoIt's just a ploy anyway, to get billions from the government through no-bid contracts. Doesn't matter what they build. Or if it even gets built, which I doubt it ever will.
- ianm218 1mo agoIt’s easy to be pessimistic about Musk timelines/ big tech but I am thrilled that ambitious, real world, hard projects are happening in the US again.
- adamtaylor_13 1mo agoYou'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.)
- zoomaboom 1mo agoGolden Dome might be "economically meaningful" but it will also lead to WWIII so, no thank you.
- ericmay 1mo agoNo it won't. Separately other countries don't get to dictate our internal policies or whether we decide to build any sort of missile defense system. If we're going to be nuked over it, then oh well they'll get nuked too. Never can we live as hostages to wanna-be dictators and tyrants (Xi Jingping, Vladimir Putin, IRGC, &c.) and if they want to blow the whole world up then so be it but acquiescing to their bullying is simply not an option. If you think it's an option, then we should issue our own nuclear threats and take them hostage instead.
- potatototoo99 1mo agoIs your cognitive dissonance that strong that you don't see that if all major countries follow that line of thought all have to have their own golden domes and invite WW3?
- 1mo ago
- estearum 1mo ago> Pecan Island and nearby wetlands are high-value habitat for migratory waterfowl, shorebirds, wading birds, and other coastal wildlife. SpaceX is not developing the full footprint of the land and will preserve wetlands and wildlife habitat. Pretty cynical corpo-ambiguity-speak, even by Musk standards. We're supposed to be happy they're promising not to develop one-hundred percent of the land footprint? They will leave at least 0.00001% of land area as wetlands and therefore we oughta be happy? Such empty bullshit it's more insulting they even put an environment-leaning section on the site. Just say "fuck it, our space fetish is more important than the wetlands."
- ceroxylon 1mo agoI 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.
- bryanlarsen 1mo agoThe wetlands around Cape Canaveral/Kennedy are thriving. Men with guns prevent people from getting too close to the rockets, and people do far more damage to wetlands than a rocket launch once every few days. A rocket launch every hour or so as SpaceX is promising might be quite different.
- miltonlost 1mo agoKennedy is also surrounded my federally protected land. SpaceX? Noooope. Never trust Elon.
- inemesitaffia 1mo agoWhy don't you check a map of the area?
- ceroxylon 1mo ago
- UltraSane 1mo agoMusk has done a huge amount to put us INTO this situation.
- ericmay 1mo agoWhich situation did Elon Musk put us in to? Can you elaborate? When did this situation start? What happened? What did he personally do that put us in the situation?
- chinathrow 1mo agoFunding DJT while he was running for office?
- ericmay 1mo agoI'm not sure what situation we're in (can someone describe it please?), but did that situation only start the day Trump took office again after being elected by the American people?
- chinathrow 1mo agoWhat are you talking about?
- ericmay 1mo agoPlease read the thread for context.
- watwut 1mo agoAnd Musks money and twitter takeover did a lot of work to convince Americans vote for Trump. Then Musk joined the administration and continued digging the hole
- ericmay 1mo agoOk. The OP wrote: > 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. In the context of the US building big things, ramping up manufacturing, doing Space exploration, &c. and the person I replied to wrote: > Musk has done a huge amount to put us INTO this situation What situation did he put us in to in this context? Did he put us in to the situation where we are building bigger things now? Are you saying that there was a situation that we were put in to and that situation only started when Trump was elected and prior to that we were... what? Building big things and trying to restore manufacturing and now we're also doing that under Trump? Someone here should be specific about what they're talking about instead of just "Musk bad Trump bad". Yea they're both morons or whatever but what exactly are we supposedly criticizing here? Just that Trump got elected? Ok that's a boring conversation let's switch back to talking about manufacturing and building big projects in America.
- krunck 1mo agoI used to be interested in SpaceX development. Then I came to the realization that SpaceX is going to be used primarily for the militarization of space: hauling space based weaponry, weaponry drop ships, surveillance satellites, etc. I still feel glad for the SpaceX engineers and scientists who succeed and doing new and innovative stuff. But their employer is just like every other military contractor sucking on the unlimited teets of the US Government. What a waste of taxpayer money. I grew up in during the Cold War and I'm sick of this shit. America always thinking it has to dominate any country that doesn't bow down before it.
- mycodendral 1mo agowhat's the alternative
- infamouscow 1mo agoThe alternative is letting bad actors conquer and subjugate you. Unless you're a total pacifist, it's a genuinely stupid and unserious position that warrants invective ridicule and mockery. I mentioned this in another comment, but was downvoted rather than greeted with pushback from people volunteering to become my personal slaves. If that sounds ridiculous, please understand that's exactly what these retards (or bots) desire. That's what their position invites to happen. (I also can't change their mind, so might as well get some morally clean slaves out of it. I might even let them free if they realize the error of their ways, which is something a conquering force would never do.)
- infamouscow 1mo agoThis 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.
- asadotzler 1mo agoIt 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.
- maeln 1mo agoFeels like an impossible project that will end up being 5% of what was advertised (the 5% being what was actually planned all along), but is made with folie des grandeurs to pump a stock who's hype has died down.
- 1970-01-01 1mo agoThe stock really didn't move much (+2%) with this big announcement. It is a city; not a short-term idea we can forget about in two weeks.
- johnyzee 1mo ago"Watch Now" just shows a black screen with an audio track for me.
- xyst 1mo agosame , you probably have ad blocking on and this video element has tracking/telemetry
- xyst 1mo agoSpace exploration is a pipe dream and fantasy that billionaires hope to have up and running just in time to "escape" the world they have helped destroy. Prove me wrong bro
- xboxnolifes 1mo agoI 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.
- sockaddr 1mo agoElon-types won't "dig us out" of our mess. Removing parasitic elements in government spending and policy will. This starts with politics. We first need a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population. All else follows. These are all things Elon actively works against. You aren't part of his future.
- ryandvm 1mo agoWe just need more leeches.
- throwaway894345 1mo agoYep, it's crazy that people can correctly recognize that corruption is responsible for the current situation but fail to recognize that adding more corruption will not deliver us from it.
- watwut 1mo agoThey will try to dig us out of the hole they created by their previoua digging.
- guywithahat 1mo ago[flagged]
- krapp 1mo ago>Isn't that an Elon thing? He was involved in DOGE, which did nothing but catch fraud and cut worthless spending. It did nothing of the sort. Finding someone still pushing this line in 2026 is like seeing a thylacine in the wild. One can only stare in awe.
- teachrdan 1mo ago> He was involved in DOGE, which did nothing but catch fraud and cut worthless spending. Elon wasn't just involved with DOGE, he was responsible for it. And Elon said he would cut $2 TRILLION in federal spending before ultimately claiming just $110 billion in savings -- which the GAO found he lied about. Considering out budget deficit is about $2 trillion, even his inflated claims are a rounding error. (To say nothing of the fact that a lot of it was NOT useless spending. For example, Elon ended a program to fund countries in Central America to stop the spread of screw worms. Now screw worms are projected to cost $1.8 billion in damage to Texas alone.) > while Elon encourages reporting on X Elon has a track record of banning journalists on Twitter / X, the everything app, when they criticize him. Literally the opposite of encouraging reporting on X. > We need more "Elons", people like him are actually helping dig us out of this mess. I would encourage you to start reading independent news sources and forming your own opinions, rather than uncritically believing everything people in power feed to you. Otherwise you end up saying things online that are trivially disprovable. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/09/gao-report-underscores-how-little-doge-cut/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/09/gao-repor... https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/flesh-eating-screw-worm-fight-plan-rcna348521 https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/flesh-eating-scr... https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-musk-silencing-his-critics-as-journalists-are-suspended-by-x/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-mus...
- bigtex88 1mo agoIsn't this an absolutely horrible idea to build this here? What happens when the next Category 5 hurricane hits this area? It's an absolute certainty that they will get another Category 5 at some point.
- asadotzler 1mo agoDo you know where NASA's launch facilities are? The Florida coast.
- btmiller 1mo agoThe Florida coast isn't defined by a huge, meandering river. Take a look at some satellite surveys that showcase how the Mississippi River changes over time. We've of course damned up the shorelines upstream where people live in places like New Orleans so there's no inherent seasonal risk of mass flooding, though of course lose the deposited silt and hence further erode the land we've "saved". Further down south toward the mouth, it's marsh land defined by however the river chooses to meander. I'm not sure where exactly SpaceX is planning to setup in LA, but the entire coastline there is chronically very poor, very unpopulated, and not supported to weather flooding of any kind, especially not hurricanes.
- ggreer 1mo agoPecan island is 40 miles away from the nearest distributary of the Mississippi (the Atchafalaya river), and there are several towns (and a highway) in between. It's the ocean & weather that erode the coastline in that area, not any rivers.
- starkparker 1mo agoThe distance from the Mississippi's flow or mouth is irrelevant compared to the sediment that flowed out of it before levees forced it to exit the way it does today. Erosion from that decision was already an issue 50 years ago; weather events accelerated the pace, but so have upriver dams that cut off sediment supply, and also shipping canals that have carved gaps into it that push surges further inland than they would otherwise, and also the chéniers that diverted floodwaters regardless of cause into more fragile marshes, and also farmland that was in active use as far south as Pecan Island up until Rita salted it, and also 50 years of oil-industry support infrastructure, and also the Deepwater rig explosion that leaked oil that killed off marshes (the settlement of which is how the state ended up capable of awarding this land), and also rampant invasive nutria that negated efforts to use agricultural fresh-water discharge to reverse previous damage. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11042/ https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11042/ https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017GL073079 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201... https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/44432/noaa_44432_DS1.pdf https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/44432/noaa_444... https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/45895/noaa_45895_DS1.pdf https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/45895/noaa_458... https://gulfspillrestoration.noaa.gov/media/document/2018-07-la-final-rpea-4070618508pdf https://gulfspillrestoration.noaa.gov/media/document/2018-07... https://www.usgs.gov/publications/accelerating-elevation-gain-indicates-land-loss-associated-erosion-mississippi-river https://www.usgs.gov/publications/accelerating-elevation-gai...
- ratelimitsteve 1mo agowell, let's see what actually gets done. or even started.
- officeplant 1mo agoAs a local who will probably end up doing work for or adjacent to this project: Fuck Elon get out of my state.
- sailfast 1mo agoGreat place to put a star base for all the reasons listed, but, uh… does anyone buy for a second that Elon Musk gives a fig about the Louisiana coastline or the migratory birds?
- tim333 1mo agoI'm sure that's there to make it more possible to get planning permission.
- moberley 1mo agoWill they have to rename the other Starbase Louisiana? https://starbasela.org/ https://starbasela.org/
- riffic 1mo agoGenerally, the way this works is that the richest person gets to whatever they want because they own the people who write the rules, and the people with less money have to abide or change.
- fblp 1mo agoI wonder if we're at the point where this shoreline critical infrastructure would need more physical security / protection from the drones of adversaries.
- dylan604 1mo agoFrom the hype video, it looks like they will be building towers in pairs. Hard to tell the distances, but if one explodes on the pad, will it's pair be in the blast radius? I'm guessing the plane will be to have a launch on one them and then move to the other for a faster launch cadence?
- pinkmuffinere 1mo agoI wonder how coastal they intend to be. They make a lot of claims about repairing the wetlands and coastal regions, but a lot of it is likely going to be underwater in the next 25 years because of rising sea levels [0], regardless of how many wetlands are repaired. And I suspect infrastructure like this probably has to be usable for something like 100 years to payoff. Maybe they're actually going to build inland, where the eventual coast will be? [0] https://www.klfy.com/louisiana/interactive-map-shows-which-parts-of-louisiana-could-be-underwater-in-2050/ https://www.klfy.com/louisiana/interactive-map-shows-which-p...
- kulahan 1mo agoThis 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??
- YetAnotherNick 1mo ago> infrastructure like this probably has to be usable for something like 100 years to payoff I don't think so. Likely the pad with last 10 years max. In any case, I highly doubt that but in any case sea level is almost certainly going to rise below a meter. Filling a meter higher with sand is a pocket change for this project.
- johnisom2001 1mo agoThere are levees and other tech that has existed for centuries and millenia to stave off flooding.
- sfblah 1mo agoHumans will never be "multiplanetary" without something like warp drive.
- digitalsurgeonz 1mo ago[dead]
- tim333 1mo agoThe eastoids do capitalism too.
- simgt 1mo agoI wish Musk had stuck to bullying his employees instead of going after everyone, because SpaceX is still building a more interesting future. Although that apparently involves pouring concrete in a wetland.
- dzonga 1mo agoElon - great product guy - he has to let go of his scammy tendencies of overpromising stuff. just one launch base will transform the Louisiana economy.
- fastball 1mo agoNth order effects are powerful things. A single person could change the trajectory of Louisiana in a meaningful way.
- tristanj 1mo agoSo this is official after months of speculation. Local realtors called this back in May https://x.com/SERobinsonJr/status/2051440979878559829 https://x.com/SERobinsonJr/status/2051440979878559829 , and Ars Technica covered these rumors earlier this month https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/spacex-is-set-to-acquire-130000-acres-of-marshland-in-southern-louisiana/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/spacex-is-set-to-acqui... . The Louisiana location has two major benefits: Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO) Access: Launches into SSO have a launch angle of ~98° relative to the equator (i.e. south), and launching from Louisiana gives a direct launch corridor over the Gulf of America without crossing major cities. SpaceX plans to launch millions of datacenter satellites in SSO, so this is the perfect launch site for their use case. SSO launches from their existing launch sites (Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral) would overfly land. Existing Methane pipelines: They are next to existing Gulf Coast natural gas/LNG infra, making bulk liquid methane delivery significantly easier. Currently for Starbase, there are no pipelines and methane is shipped in via truck. Delivering the ~1,000 metric tons of methane required for a single Starship launch requires 50-60 tanker truck deliveries.
- daft_pink 1mo agoA quick ctrl f for Gulf of America yield no results. Just curious lol.
- leetrout 1mo agoIt's in the comments here tho.
- rickreynoldssf 1mo agoI wonder how many environmentalists are losing their shit over this and burring the lawsuit machine.
- preisschild 1mo agoHabitat destruction is bad actually
- boxed 1mo agoAnd yet, the area around Chernobyl and the DMZ between North and South Korea are two of the most important bio diversity areas in their respective areas. I think most environmentalists are rather confused about what is good and what is bad for the environment.
- rbanffy 1mo agoLook! Flame trenches, the kind Elon said were useless because he had a better idea - that inverted shower floor.
- fig781 1mo agoI definitely read this as Starbucks. Boy was I surprised when I clicked on the link
- maxlin 1mo agoThe whole state just multiplied their amount of big dick energy. Crazy good for Louisianans
- wonderwonder 1mo ago[flagged]
- calldacopsidgaf 1mo ago"Elon Musk has promised to send humans to Mars at least eight times since 2016. Every single deadline has passed without a launch." you know what they say about "fool me twice" right? Add six more "fool me"s and we're now at your position. https://tesorb.com/spacex-mars-timeline-accountability-missed-deadlines/ https://tesorb.com/spacex-mars-timeline-accountability-misse...
- Animats 1mo agoSurprising that Space-X didn't just buy KSC from NASA. Space-X already does most of the launches from KSC anyway.
- outside1234 1mo agoWill look forward to the articles in five years of how trashed the LA coast is
- r2ob 1mo agoHow many drones can it deploy on Earth?
- steele 1mo agoYes yes, mountains of gold in this new world! just get on this boat!
- tootie 1mo ago> We’re committed to investing at least $100 billion and creating more than 3,000 new jobs at Starbase, Louisana Does each job pay $30M?
- carlosochoa 1mo agoNot all the money is going towards salaries. I imagine that steel and concrete cost quite a bit in the specific configurations required by the project.
- jongjong 1mo agoI have nothing against humans becoming multi-planetary but this is a luxurious desire at this point in history. We should solve poverty first. This is the kind of project which you do once there are no more problems to solve on earth.
- ipnon 1mo agoFrom 1990 to 2025, the number of people in extreme poverty dropped from around 2.3 billion to roughly 831 million. I think we're making fast enough progress here to warrant public companies going to space on their own dime and volition.
- cesarvarela 1mo agoSpace exploration might help solve poverty, though. It will create new occupations, as new technology and discoveries always do.
- formvoltron 1mo agoThis is madness. People seriously need to value this thing realistically. Otherwise we are handing the money required over to a raging narcissist who plans to launch hundreds and thousands of rockets, each one burning KEROSENE or methane... For what? Live on mars? Aykm? Starlink? Nifty but I get unlimited 5g 300 Mbps unlimited for 8 euros a month. And does starlink work inside? What else? Does nobody else see it as kind of strange that humans with all of our technology still have not figured out a better way to power a rocket with kerosene or methane? And we're powering the most cutting edge computing AI using.... Fossil fuels. Fail
- jackhalford 1mo ago> In Vermilion Parish, the shoreline is eroding between 3.3 and 23 feet per year What does this mean, how can a shoreline erode
- Brybry 1mo agoGrade school level Louisiana info (probably somewhat wrong): It's generally brackish marsh/swamp land. Basically think silt/dirt with a bunch of plants evolved for this specific environment. Then you take a bunch of humans and you cut down all the really old cypress trees for lumber. To facilitate that process you cut channels through all the plants that are in the way so you can ship that lumber via new unobstructed waterways. You also do it for oil/gas exploitation. So now you have a lot of infiltration of saltier or fresher water and less protection during storm surge and such. Lots of plants die and these plants were holding the dirt/soil in place (and the storm surge helps wash that away). Also you re-engineer the original waterways that deposited silt/dirt and helped build these areas up so that they deposit silt/dirt in other places (also you harvest the silt/dirt for use in farming so it never even gets that far down the waterways in the first place).
- edg5000 1mo agoIn the Netherlands we rely on beach grass, a type of grass that can root well in loose sand, to keep dunes together. This forms the main sea barrier. The grass has historically been replanted at least partially to maintain the protection. This spans back at least a few hundred years I believe. It's interesting that Lousisana works so differently. I always kind of assumed that dunes would always be needed to keep the sea out in low lying areas, but that's not the case at all.
- hadlock 1mo agoMost of the erosion is due to oil and gas companies dredging poorly thought out canals to move drilling equipment through the marsh, causing unslowed erosion for ~70+ years.
- hadlock 1mo ago
- jsjdjdjsjsnsj 1mo ago[dead]
- shy107 1mo ago[dead]
- fsuts 1mo agoHow are SpaceX paying for it? it’s costing $100bn… but they don’t have $100bn…
- joelthelion 1mo agoI imagine they plan to rely on debt, which is the fashionable thing to do these days. The wake up call might be difficult, for the whole country or even the whole world.
- boxed 1mo agoPresumably this will be built out in parts over many years. It's not like they throw down 100bn and POOF there's the full thing completed magically.
- thrance 1mo agoMore no-bid contracts, under the guise of building a "golden dome" that I'll bet my hands will never exist.
- zoomaboom 1mo agoThe amount of effort by some to make it exist is hard to imagine. I wouldn't bet against it. The problem is it will be destabilizing and you and everyone else will lose more than just their hands.
- renierbotha 1mo agoAll I saw was nipples
- poulpy123 1mo agoThe first sentence is already a scam "multiplanetary future" lmao, they can't stop themselves lying
- tim333 1mo agoStretch goal.
- runamok 1mo agoWhere exactly are they planning to build this? See https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/louisianas-shrinking-coast-offers-narrowing-window-managed-retreat https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/louisianas-shrinki.... Ah, Vermilion Parish which is ~160 miles east of New Orleans...