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The Real Reason SpaceX Chose Louisiana — Transcript · YTtoTranscript

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The Real Reason SpaceX Chose Louisiana

The Space Race · 2,612 words · 13 min read · EN-ORIG

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Below is the complete, readable transcript of The Real Reason SpaceX Chose Louisiana by The Space Race on YouTube. Read the full text, copy any part you need, or generate a transcript for any video with our free tool.

This is Starbase Texas. You probably know this place. It's where SpaceX builds and tests the most powerful rocket in the world and what Elon Musk has dubbed the gateway to Mars. But there's a big problem with Starbase. It's too small. Way too small to ever live up to the grand ambitions that SpaceX has for making humanity a

multi-planetary species. Now, what if we made it 125 times bigger? What would that look like? Well, it might be something like this. An epic spaceport that stretches on as far as the eye can see and unlocks the true potential of the Starship rocket. This is Starbase 2 and it's coming sooner than you think.

We know all of this because SpaceX recently confirmed their purchase of 125,000 acres on the coast of Louisiana in a region known as Pecan Island, which is located kind of in between New Orleans and Houston. That is compared to the existing Starbase [music] Texas, which is about 1,000 acres. The new property is more

than three times the size [music] of Disney World or roughly equivalent to the city of San Jose, California. And you've probably noticed it's not actually an island. This is more like a high ridge of solid ground that is surrounded by wetlands. And the new Starbase location is going to be down here where the freshwater city canal

[music] meets the Gulf water. This is the end of a lonely old beat-up road that's obviously seen better days, but the Google Street View car was able to make it down, so we can take a look around and see that as of January 2025, there's not much but a collapsed fence, Jesse Pinkman's meth lab, and some kind of

mysterious wreckage in the distance that looks like Forrest Gump's shrimping boat. But aside from that, it's all flat desolate land for miles around, which looks like a perfect place to launch some rockets. >> [music] >> SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said that this is one of the few locations remaining in the US where they could

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still find a large amount of empty land along the southern coast with not too many people living in the general vicinity. And we'll explain why this prime piece of seaside real estate has remained empty for so long in a minute. But the closest human settlement that you are going to find on Pecan Island is

up here along Highway 82 where it runs parallel to the coast. [music] This is an unincorporated rural community with a population of about 300 people scattered along a few miles of roadway. >> [music] >> It's not so different from what SpaceX found when they moved into Boca Chica Village, which is now known as the city

of Starbase. That was more like a failed suburb with two blocks of housing that was built in the 1960s, but then abandoned after a hurricane blew through and scared off the developer. Pecan Island is a little more established. They have two churches, one school, Herbert's gun shop, and a food store, which from my research on Google Maps

has a gas pump, some ice machines, hard liquor, alligator heads, this adorable southern grandma, and buckets of live crabs. I mean, what more could a person need? So, all of this is located about 10 miles away from the new Starbase development, which looks to be a pretty similar distance between the existing Texas launchpad and the nearby towns of

Port Isabel and South Padre Island, which is where people tend to watch Starship launches from. I've never been down for one, but I'm guessing at least a few of you guys have, so you know better than me, but the general consensus seems to be that at this distance, you definitely do feel a

strong vibration that rattles windows along with a low frequency rumble that kind of sounds like thunder, but goes on for over a minute. So, it's hard to know exactly how that small group of people feel about their new neighbors, but I did spend some time lurking on community Facebook pages for Vermilion Parish,

which is the broader municipality around Pecan Island, and it includes a few larger towns. Opinions on there seem to be pretty split between optimism that SpaceX will bring a lot of new money and jobs to the region with opposition saying that Elon Musk is an egotistical fraud and SpaceX will destroy the natural landscape that locals hold dear.

And for sure, there are arguments be made for both sides, but Elon Musk and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry are both pretty insistent that this will be an overwhelmingly positive development for Vermilion Parish and the state as a whole. Musk says that SpaceX will invest 100 billion dollars into development of the new Starbase site. Of course, this

will include the construction and operation of new launchpads and rocket factories. And looking at the early rendering here, we can see that there are five launch complexes, each with two towers. Only one tower at each launch site has a rocket queued up, which makes sense. I don't think you can actually launch two that close together, but this

could be a one launch, one catch system where they alternate between the two towers. Each launch complex has its own dedicated tank farm for fuel and water, and we can see that there are autonomous transport vehicles rolling in with new boosters as Starships are lifting off. These are the extra long V4 ships being

used, so they're actually taller than the launch towers. In the distance [music] is a star factory where new Starships are manufactured featuring an extra wide gigabay where fully stacked rockets are prepared for launch. With all of this new stuff getting built, SpaceX expects to create 3,000 jobs in the near term, but could employ

up to 10,000 people by the time the spaceport is fully established. SpaceX noted that most of their employees are not engineers or scientists, they're technicians, welders, and pipe benders, so there is opportunity for everyone. In addition to that, Musk said that a lot of this money is going to be spent on conservation of the land, and there is

very good reason for this. The Louisiana coastline is disappearing at the fastest rate of any natural coast in the US, with the shoreline eroding as much as 23 ft per year. What Musk and his team want to build here is a spaceport for the future of humanity, and that's not going to work

if it all falls into the sea after 10 years. So, to combat this, SpaceX is developing a new coastal master plan that would focus on rebuilding local marshlands, which provide natural buffer zones that protect against damage from storms and prevent erosion. There's also been talk about SpaceX building new levees along the coastline

down here. These are essentially just barriers made of compacted soil that work to prevent flooding, which is a pretty big concern for this area during hurricane season. You probably remember what happened to New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Pecan Island has been hit by two major hurricanes in the past 25 years, [music]

both causing storm surge flooding 10 to 12 ft deep and destroying local infrastructure. So, that probably tells us why more people haven't been moving out here. SpaceX doesn't want that to happen at their new spaceport, and by protecting their own giant property, they will by extension protect the entire Vermilion Parish region from storm flooding. Now,

there is another reason why the coastline around here is in such poor condition, and it actually has a lot to do with why SpaceX chose Louisiana for their new Starbase. As Governor Landry pointed out in his speech at the SpaceX announcement, this region has a long history with oil and natural gas extraction. That's what the SpaceX site

was originally used for back in the 1950s. This was a connection point to offshore drilling rigs where product would be brought in and processed before getting floated up the Freshwater City Canal into mainland USA. All of the industrialization was done with pretty much no regard for the environment and no one ever made an

effort to restore the land after the oil and gas industry had moved on. Now, SpaceX doesn't need oil for their rockets, but they do need a massive amount of natural gas. The Starship rocket uses two propellants, liquid oxygen and liquid methane. And what we call natural gas is typically around 90% methane with trace

amounts of other hydrocarbons like propane and butane. The term natural gas is really just marketing. Studies found that it got a more positive response from the public than methane gas. But either way, the earth around the Louisiana coast is filled with rocket fuel and all of the pipelines are already in place to get it out. Now, all

SpaceX has to do is exploit that resource. So, while launch towers tend to get the most attention, some of the most valuable infrastructure at the new Starbase will actually be their natural gas processing plant, which basically just purifies methane and then chills it down to the point where it changes from a gas to a liquid state. This will

operate in tandem with an air separation facility. Like we just said, Starship needs liquid oxygen propellant. The air around you right now is probably about 20% oxygen by volume. So, they need to extract that. But, they're not just stripping oxygen from air and then blowing it back out. That would be a waste because the other 80% is mostly

nitrogen and this is also something that gets used a lot in rocket launches. Since nitrogen gas is inert, meaning it won't catch fire and it won't cause corrosion, it typically gets stored in tanks on board the rocket called COPVs and the gas is used to maintain pressure inside closed systems like the engines

and fuel lines. Over at Starbase Texas, they have none of this infrastructure. So, before every launch or engine test, SpaceX needs to truck in massive amounts of liquid methane, oxygen, and nitrogen. As many as 250 trucks are needed to launch a fully stacked Starship Super Heavy. >> [music] >> Then, as they wait for the moment of

launch, all of it gets stored in insulated tanks that desperately work to keep the liquids at ultra-low cryogenic temperatures in spite of the southern heat. But, ultimately, an amount of fuel is going to be lost to boil off every time. This is all a big pain in the ass, but for only a handful of launches per

year, it's manageable. For 30 launches a day, SpaceX needs this infrastructure first before anything gets off the ground. SpaceX is also talking about transportation infrastructure around the site. A deep water shipping port would allow the company to bring in resources from Texas that are floated up and around the Gulf. It also gives them an

ideal location to ship out and down to NASA spaceport in Florida. They're even talking about building an airport on the property, as well. Now, one important thing to note is that what SpaceX is building in Louisiana will not replace what they already have in Texas. It's about providing a wider range of options

for launching across the Gulf water. Now, this is probably not the kind of thing that most people think about. But, when you launch a rocket, it can't just go flying off in any direction. For now, at least, rocket boosters can't fly over populated areas. So, when Starship launches from Texas, it has to go

straight out and thread the needle through this gap between Florida and Cuba. That doesn't give you a whole lot of range as far as choosing where you want the payload to end up in Earth orbit. >> [music] >> Things can change direction in space, but probably not as much as you might think. You're kind of stuck with the

general direction you take from launch. That's why we also launch rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. From here, rockets tend to fly in a southern direction, and this gives them access to polar orbits that go over the top and bottom of the earth, which is necessary for things like Starlink that need to cover the entire

globe, not just the equator. Now, if you look at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, they have tons of room to fly east, but can't go south or north. Now, if we go back to Boca Chica Island, you start to see what makes this real estate so prime for Starship. They can go east and shoot the same Florida

gap as they've already done from Texas, but they can also go south and fly over the water between Mexico and Cuba. So, this new Starbase would have the very unique ability to hit both polar orbit and equatorial orbits from the same launchpad. >> [music] >> And it's probably the reason why SpaceX is building more launchpads here than

anywhere else. They have two in Texas, and they've got three now in Florida. While Louisiana is going to start off with 10 launchpads that Elon has promised to have up and running by 2029, with a dozen or more being the long-term goal. Of course, we take everything he says with a handful of salt. 2029 is not that

far away, but there are reasons to believe things could be different this time. SpaceX made an announcement recently that kind of flew under the radar for most, but actually revealed a massive shift in the company's priority. On August 25th, SpaceX VP of launch Kiko Donchev posted that the Falcon 9 rocket had made [music] its final Starlink

delivery from Florida. As in, no more Starlink launches on Falcon 9 from the East Coast, ever. [music] That's not because Starlink is finished, far from it, and he said that Falcon 9 will continue launching from Vandenberg on the West Coast to build out Starlink's polar orbit coverage, but there will be no more expansion of the

main Starlink constellation [music] until Starship is ready to take over. So, that has to happen >> [music] >> soon. Not only because the Starlink network needs to continue growing to improve the coverage and quality of their service, but SpaceX needs to launch more Starlinks just to maintain. We're at a point now where old Starlink

satellites fall out of the sky and burn up on a near daily basis and they need to be replaced before the network actually begins to shrink. So they're putting more pressure on Starship than ever before, [music] which might not make a whole lot of sense from the outside, but it makes me think that SpaceX knows something we

don't [music] and they have a very high level of confidence that Starship is about to do something huge very soon. So while building a giant 10 launch pad spaceport in Louisiana might look like one of the more fantastical [music] things that SpaceX has dreamed up, this is quickly going to become something that the company absolutely needs just

to survive. If you want to see what's inside a Starship factory [music] with custom made 3D models, we've got that on screen for you right now. It's pretty cool. Expensive though. If you want to fund what we do, consider supporting with a membership using the join button below.