Then President-elect Donald Trump listens as Elon Musk explains Starship operations ahead of the launch of its sixth test flight in November.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX may be angling for a Louisiana Purchase of its own with plans to buy a 136,000-acre swath of Gulf Coast marshland for a Starship testing and development site.
Rumors of a space company making a big land grab have been swirling around parishes in coastal Louisiana for some time, and the state’s Legislature has been making moves to cut taxes and limit liabilities for aerospace outfits.
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Those measures mirror laws the Texas Legislature enacted when enticing SpaceX to South Texas.
Louisiana state Sen. Bob Hensgens has told local outlets that two space companies have been talking with landowners in Vermilion and Cameron parishes but didn’t specify the firms.
SpaceX hasn’t commented and local government officials are also mum on details about any deals to develop the 212-square-mile site along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway near Pecan Island and Freshwater City.
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The Vermilion Corp., a private land conservation firm, and ExxonMobil control much of the tract. ExxonMobil backed away from a 2022 plan to develop a 125,000-acre carbon capture and storage project on the land and some think that change offered an opening for SpaceX.
“Dealing with a single corporate seller like ExxonMobil makes a 136,000-acre transaction infinitely easier than negotiating with hundreds of private landowners,” said Jim Keaty, a Lafayette real estate broker who’s been researching the potential deal. “That’s exactly the kind of deal Elon Musk’s team would chase.”
Hensgens told one new outlet that “there is talk about buying Vermilion Corporation,” but that he didn’t know “which space exploration company is negotiating with them.”
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Keaty also reported changes to access to hunting leases in the area for the 2026 season and property owners around Freshwater City getting unsolicited purchase offers at 10 times their land’s appraised value from out-of-state investors.
“This perfectly mirrors SpaceX’s 2019 Boca Chica playbook, where SpaceX (and speculators tracking SpaceX) offered three to 10 times appraised value to secure the perimeter around their launch site,” he wrote.
The talk of more SpaceX expansion comes as it prepares to go public this summer in what’s expected to be the largest-ever initial public offering. The company reportedly is on track to be worth $2 trillion.
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It comes amid a flurry of growth in Texas as SpaceX rushes to bring its Starship mega-rocket online to meet NASA and Pentagon contract timelines.
A SpaceX Starship is prepared for a test flight from Starbase in November 2024.
In Texas, the growth is getting more pushback from neighbors over rocket engine noise and vibrations. More than 150 homeowners recently sued SpaceX over alleged property damage from rocket noise and vibrations coming from the company’s McGregor test site outside Waco and Starbase complex near Brownsville.
According to Kim Burke, an industry analyst with Quilty Space, SpaceX has been looking for another facility to test the Starship’s Raptor engines, which are more powerful and louder than the engines used on the company’s smaller Falcon rockets.
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“McGregor is acoustically maxed out, and the neighbors are over it,” she said in an e-mail.
Burke thinks the potential Louisiana site will be a Starship hot-fire test complex that can support static fires, Raptor engine production and maybe another factory line.
“Full-stack static fires are insanely loud, and SpaceX keeps running into humans and wildlife that aren’t fans,” she said. “Thirty thousand acres of empty marsh fixes that problem in a way basically nowhere else on the Gulf can.”
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Such a setup would take pressure off McGregor and Starbase as Starship ramps up to as many as 25 flights a year from Texas and 44 annually from Florida.
“Build there, fire on the stand, and barge east to Florida or back to Boca Chica,” Burke said. “Low-risk bet here, but my money is on SpaceX.”
Most agree that the facility will not be used for launches due to its geographic location.
“Near-zero chance it’s a launch site,” she said. Eastward azimuths fly over New Orleans, Mobile and the Panhandle and south azimuths would put malfunctions over the Yucatán.
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“The FAA isn’t licensing either of those for Starship cadence.”
Burke said Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin isn’t a likely contender for developing the land because its engine supply chain doesn’t need barges.
While no public filings about the deal have appeared, Burke highlighted the recent legislative actions to help lure a major aerospace firm.
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One law outlined tax rebates for an “approved aerospace facility owner” that intends to create at least 200 new jobs and invest at least $1 billion in new capital between July 2026 and July 2031.
Legislators are also adding laws, like those in Texas, that shield aerospace companies from liability caused by their operations, including damage caused by “noise, sonic boom, overflight, vibration, light, heat, exhaust, smoke, odor, visual intrusion, temporary access restrictions, or any other disturbance resulting from aerospace flight activities.”
Others deem aerospace facilities as critical infrastructure and allow aerospace companies to use the state’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program.
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“Nobody writes in a $1B threshold and noise/smoke immunity into law unless they know who the buyer is,” she said.
