The official announcement hasn’t come yet, though we’re pretty reliably informed that the project is certainly too far along not to go public.

SpaceX is coming to Vermilion Parish. Elon Musk’s rocket/space exploration/AI company is going to set up shop on a 130,000-acre site on Pecan Island, building a facility which will house data centers, assembly plants, testing facilities and launch centers for the next stage of its operations.

But what about the people of Pecan Island? You mean the 150 or so people who have fishing camps along Highway 82? One assumes they’d be very well compensated should they wish to sell to one of the richest corporations on earth.

And as we understand it, the site in question is well away from Highway 82 anyway. As you can see from the featured image at the top of the page, SpaceX building their facility along the coast would put them miles and miles away from any populated areas. It’s nothing but marshland there between Freshwater City, which isn’t a city at all but rather a boat launch and a Corps of Engineers lock, and Hackberry Beach.

This is as desolate an area as you’ll find in Louisiana. And as we understand it, SpaceX is keeping most of it that way.

Almost all of the land, if not actually all of the land, currently belongs to ExxonMobil. It’s bound up in legal wrangling over the coastal lawsuits against the oil industry which have pretty much cinched the notion that ExxonMobil isn’t going to be doing oil exploration in Louisiana ever again and certainly not along the coast. SpaceX coming in and either buying or leasing the land will mean SpaceX is now going to be motivated – by self-interest if not actual contractual obligations with the state or the parish – to put in improvements to protect and restore the coast.

What’s perhaps most entertaining is that at one point, ExxonMobil was going to use this land for a carbon capture facility. That went away for a number of reasons, one of which was, as we’ve predicted, there really isn’t much reason why those facilities have to be built in the first place. So now the deal moves to SpaceX, which is precisely the sort of high-tech, 21st-century company that everyone has been saying Louisiana has to have if we’re going to compete economically and keep our people from leaving.

And, so, voila. What’s envisioned is a much larger facility than Starbase, which is SpaceX’s spaceport at Boca Chica, Texas. That site is only 1,400 acres.

And SpaceX is talking about thousands of Starship launches per year. Multiple launches per day, every day. They’re going to massively expand their constellation of satellites – up to a million, is the word. The amount of economic activity involved in that much spaceport traffic will juice Vermilion Parish’s economy beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. To call it transformative is hardly sufficient.

Why Vermilion Parish?

Because nobody lives in this area. There is nobody to complain other than people who fish and hunt in and around Pecan Island but don’t actually live there.

Also, because SpaceX will get direct access to the Intracoastal Waterway and the Gulf, so they can move oversized Starship components and keep them off the roads and railways. There aren’t a lot of sites that will give that kind of access without being  populated or developed – of course Louisiana is going to over such a site since we’ve done such a terrible job of development for decades.

And it’s halfway between Boca Chica and Kennedy Space Center. Which isn’t all that big a deal. It’s also in close proximity to the Henry Hub, the biggest natural gas pipeline switchyard in America, which means more ready access to propellant than basically anywhere.

Not to mention that your rockets take off from Pecan Island and they’re immediately over the Gulf of America, so there is much, much less threat of a major disaster should one crash – and we know that SpaceX rockets crash all the time; that’s the price of their innovation.

When this thing is announced, which we’ve heard will come later this month, it’s very likely going to be the largest economic development win in Louisiana since Standard Oil built their refinery in Baton Rouge a century ago, if not ever. We’ve heard this is a $100 billion project before it’s all said and done, between what SpaceX will build for its own facilities, the infrastructure which will get laid in to support access to SpaceX’s plant, the housing and civilian infrastructure for the employees who’ll work at the facility and the improvements to things like drainage, coastal protection and so on which will come.

And yet we’re hearing people whining about this.

They’re worried about the migratory birds who visit the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge to the west of where SpaceX is going to set up shop.

They say that the noise pollution and sonic booms will shake nearby houses down, because people have sued about that in Boca Chica. Except this is more remote than Boca Chica, and the launch trajectory from Pecan Island is much different vis-a-vis Boca Chica.

They say that the local infrastructure can’t support a massive SpaceX facility. Yes, obviously, which is why there will be all new infrastructure built to support the SpaceX facility, just like they built in Boca Chica.

And the big complaint is the lack of transparency around the project. This is where you get all of the screaming about NDA’s from people who apparently have zero exposure to business deals.

Because politicians involved in negotiating the biggest economic development win in the state’s history with a $2 trillion company that is considering basing the bulk of its operations here have had to sign NDA’s so that they don’t use their involvement in those negotiations to leverage that company into God-knows-what.

It’s utterly shocking to me, though it shouldn’t be, that people don’t understand why SpaceX would want to force Louisiana politicians to sign an NDA. After the way Louisiana politicians have spent decades jacking up every poor-bastard out-of-state company who has ever looked into doing business here? Seriously?

There is no universe in which SpaceX is going to negotiate out in the open with the local-yokel politicians in Vermilion Parish and at the state capitol, and let a local and state media who generally hates Jeff Landry and/or Elon Musk and will do everything they can to poison the well for this project because they don’t want to see those wins take turns shredding this deal. The only way to prevent that from happening is to make them sign NDA’s.

Would you not try to bind Louisiana politicians by contract if you had to do business with them?

And what’s hilarious is the idea that because some of these people signed an NDA it’s evidence they’ve been bought off. As if you need an NDA to buy off a Louisiana politician. Anybody who thinks that matters in the least was born last night. On a turnip truck.

This is the single biggest win Louisiana has had in anybody’s lifetime. If and when it happens it will completely transform Louisiana’s coast in ways which actually create a reason for the kinds of resources it will take to prevent coastal loss, if not actually produce those resources based on the wealth SpaceX’s endeavors will generate.

Anyone complaining about this because a few ducks won’t like it or because a spaceship launch might rattle a window at their fishing camp (which they will be able to rent out for top dollar at Airbnb to people who’ll want to watch rocket launches multiple times a day) really ought not be taken seriously. It’s amazing how dumb people can be.