Elon Musk to build world's largest spaceport in Louisiana

SpaceX, which recently went public, has announced it will build its largest launch site yet in the US state of Louisiana. The $100 billion project (more than two trillion crowns) is meant, within three years, to support thousands of Starship rocket launches a year — something the company's founder Elon Musk needs in order to put artificial-intelligence data centers into orbit.

The new base will be called Starbase, Louisiana, and will cover 125,000 acres — more than fifty thousand hectares. Construction is set to begin as early as next year. According to the company, the site is meant to support “thousands of Starship launches a year, with missions to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond.” The first launch from the site is planned for 2029.

According to Louisiana's economic development agency, the base will create more than three thousand direct jobs over ten years, with an average annual salary of $92,600 — roughly twice the typical wage in Vermilion Parish. About eight thousand more jobs are expected to be created indirectly. State officials expect the project to turn the region into a “global hub for next-generation aviation and spaceflight.”

This is the second time Musk has used the name Starbase: since last year it has also been the name of a town in Cameron County, Texas, where the company tests and develops rockets and where the core of the entrepreneur's business empire is based.

SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq this past June — the largest stock-market debut in history. Since then, its shares have fallen more than 30% from their highs, but still remain above the $135 offering price.

The reason is the pace of investment. Although the company's revenue grew 92% year-on-year in the second quarter, SpaceX is still unprofitable. Expanding computing capacity for artificial intelligence alone cost almost $16 billion (330 billion crowns) in a single quarter — more than twice the company's total quarterly revenue.

By the Around Prague newsroom