To call this a big deal is pretty insufficient. It’s better to say that it’s the biggest deal.

Welcome to the world’s newest space coast.

Gov. Jeff Landry invited Louisiana elected officials and business leaders to Abbeville Tuesday to announce plans by Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build a multibillion-dollar spaceport, according to a post from The Advocate.

The proposed facility would feature launch infrastructure to send reusable Starship rockets into orbit from an 18-mile stretch of the Louisiana coastline.

An email invitation issued by the governor’s office and Louisiana Economic Development invited guests to join Landry and LED Secretary Susan Bourgeois for “a defining moment for Louisiana’s future.” The announcement will take place in Abbeville.

The proposed spaceport would be built on roughly 130,000 acres of land formerly owned by ExxonMobil. A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana signed an order dismissing coastal pollution lawsuits against the oil company, finalizing a settlement that transferred the land to the state.

SpaceX is expected to take control of the site through a sale, donation or long-term lease.

State lawmakers passed a package of legal incentives this spring to support aerospace development.

The legislation shields aerospace companies from liability related to launch activities and prevents local governments or individuals from suing to block launch operations.

The coastal site southwest of Lafayette offers several logistical advantages for SpaceX. The remote area provides access to natural gas lines and proximity to the Intracoastal Waterway, which can accommodate heavy barges carrying rockets. Its position on the Gulf of Mexico is also suited for launching satellites along north-south orbits.

The project could bring thousands of jobs and commercial aerospace activity to coastal areas sandwiched between two wildlife refuges, an area widely used for recreational hunting and fishing. Specific coastal protection measures are also expected to be detailed as part of the overall agreement.

SpaceX executives have indicated a need for additional launch sites to achieve plans of launching up to 100,000 Starlink mobile and broadband satellites and up to 1 million orbital data center satellites. Musk’s personal aircraft was spotted at the Lafayette airport for several hours last week.

Gov. Landry and LED Bourgeois will host the formal announcement event at 11 a.m. Tuesday in Abbeville, where officials are expected to outline additional project details and coastal protection measures.

We talked about the project a little a week and a half ago. That was before the judicial signoff on the land transfer, which was the final hurdle to moving this thing forward.

We don’t know if they’re going to announce it on Tuesday, but one interesting aspect of this facility is that they’re not just going to do rocket assembly and launch operations, they’re also apparently going to make rocket fuel on site.

Public Service Commissioner Eric Skrmetta offered this up…

Louisiana is days away from what state officials and industry sources describe as the largest economic development announcement in the state’s history, and the details emerging about SpaceX’s proposed Pecan Island spaceport go far beyond launch pads.

Sources familiar with the project say the company intends to pair its Starship operations with an enormous on-site industrial complex dedicated to producing the two propellants the rocket actually burns: liquid oxygen and liquid methane. At the center of that plan, they say, is roughly 5,500 megawatts of behind-the-meter power generation, enough electricity to supply several mid-sized cities, most of it earmarked for cryogenic air separation that will pull oxygen from the atmosphere and chill it into the dense liquid form Starship requires. A smaller but still substantial 200 megawatts is expected to arrive over transmission lines from SLEMCO, the local rural electric cooperative that serves much of Vermilion Parish.

An official unveiling of the power figures is anticipated as early as Tuesday, when Gov. Jeff Landry is widely expected to formalize the land agreement that would give SpaceX control of approximately 130,000 acres of coastal marshland stretching across an 18-mile corridor near Pecan Island and Freshwater City.

A spaceport built around fuel

Starship’s Raptor engines run on a mixture of liquid methane and liquid oxygen. At the launch rates SpaceX has publicly targeted, eventually measured in the thousands of flights per year, trucking those cryogenic liquids into a remote coastal site becomes logistically impossible. The company has already begun solving the same problem at its Starbase facility in South Texas by constructing air-separation plants for oxygen and planning natural-gas pipelines and liquefaction units for methane.

Pecan Island, sources say, will take that approach further. The bulk of the planned 5,500 megawatts would drive large-scale air-separation units that compress, cool and distill ambient air into liquid oxygen (and nitrogen). Simultaneously, the site’s proximity to the Henry Hub and existing Gulf of Mexico natural-gas infrastructure would allow SpaceX to draw methane directly from the regional pipeline network and liquefy it on site. The same local gas that feeds the liquefaction plants could also fuel the on-site turbines generating most of the electricity, creating a tightly integrated industrial loop.

The 200-megawatt SLEMCO interconnection would function as a practical complement rather than the primary supply. Rural cooperatives routinely deliver loads of this size once transmission upgrades are in place. The hybrid arrangement, massive private generation behind the meter plus a firm grid tie, mirrors the model SpaceX has used for its large artificial-intelligence computing campuses elsewhere, where grid connection timelines and reliability concerns have pushed the company toward self-generation.

Why this stretch of marsh

The land itself became available through a complex settlement of long-running coastal lawsuits against ExxonMobil, which had controlled the roughly 130,000-acre tract for decades. Earlier plans by the oil company for a large carbon-capture project on the same acreage were withdrawn. The state Legislature this spring passed a package of aerospace incentives and liability protections widely understood to have been tailored for a project of this scale.

Location advantages repeatedly cited by aerospace analysts include sparse population (Pecan Island’s permanent residents number only about 100), direct access to the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway for barging oversized rocket hardware, and launch trajectories that keep spent stages over open water while enabling certain polar and sun-synchronous orbits useful for large satellite constellations. The same natural-gas abundance that makes methane liquefaction straightforward also supports on-site power generation.

Local stakes and next steps

For Vermilion Parish the project would represent a transformation measured in thousands of construction and permanent jobs, new roads and utility corridors, and the prospect of coastal-restoration commitments written into the land agreement. SLEMCO’s role, while secondary in megawatt terms, would still require significant transmission work and could bring long-term load growth to the cooperative.

Environmental concerns remain real. The marshland is a critical stopover for migratory birds along the Mississippi Flyway and sits in a region already losing land to subsidence and sea-level rise. Project sources say the agreement under negotiation includes provisions for coastal protection and habitat management, though the details have not been made public.

If the power and propellant figures are confirmed next week, Pecan Island will stand as more than another launch complex. It will be an industrial demonstration of the vertical integration SpaceX argues is essential for the flight rates needed to deploy massive satellite constellations and, eventually, to support operations beyond Earth. Mastering continuous, large-scale production of liquid oxygen from air and liquid methane from natural gas on the Louisiana coast would also refine the same cryogenic and chemical-engineering disciplines required for producing propellant from local resources on Mars.

For now the parish waits for Tuesday’s announcement. The land deal is said to be in its final stages. The power numbers, if they match what sources describe, will signal that SpaceX intends to treat Pecan Island not simply as a place to launch rockets, but as a place to manufacture the fuel that makes those launches possible at industrial scale.

The buildout of the SpaceX facility is going to be one of the largest private-sector industrial projects in world history. The numbers being thrown around indicate this is going to be as much as a $100 BILLION capital investment. To give you an indication of how big a deal that is, Louisiana is currently sitting on a $206 billion economic development pipeline – meaning that’s how much planned investment is set for the state’s economy – and that’s the largest pipeline in the country at present.

This would be essentially a 50 percent increase on top of that.

We’ve never had anything like this. The economic activity this represents transforms Louisiana’s economy. The demand this will create for just about everything is going to mean full employment for southwest Louisiana for a decade, not to mention a massive influx of people.

Lafayette is about to become a very big city. The Lafayette metro might just end up being the biggest in the state. The challenge now is going to be to create the road network from I-10 to the coast that can accommodate what’s coming.

That might sound fanciful to you, but this is how big cities are made.

SpaceX, on the scale being discussed, will be in a position to do for the Lafayette area what Boeing did for Seattle or what Standard Oil did for Cleveland. Or what Andrew Carnegie’s steel company did for Pittsburgh. Get a big enough economic generator in place, and servicing it leads to an economy of its own. And once those services are in place, related industries locate nearby to take advantage of the workforce and infrastructure already in place.

Closer to home, remember – Austin was a sleepy Southern capital a lot like Baton Rouge until Michael Dell started making computers in his garage in Round Rock just up the road. When Dell Computer took off, the companies supplying parts to make those computers needed to locate facilities nearby to meet Dell’s needs. And the next thing you knew, Austin was the hub for the semiconductor industry and that led it to be a tech hub which is starting to rival Silicon Valley.

Lafayette now has an opportunity to be, for space exploration and satellites, what Austin is for tech.

That’s how big this is.

You’re going to have to recalibrate a lot of your assumptions about Louisiana. Maybe all of them. Our world changes on Tuesday.