On 125,000 acres on Pecan Island, "Starbase, Louisiana" is expected to host thousands of Starship flights per year, with the first launch targeted in 2029.
On August 25, SpaceX unveiled a project for a Starship launch complex in southern Louisiana, valued at up to $100 billion. The selected site, 125,000 acres of coastal wetlands on Pecan Island, will be named Starbase, Louisiana and will be added to the existing facilities in South Texas and Florida.
The company's president, Gwynne Shotwell, puts forward the goal of several thousand Starship flights per year in the long term. The work is due to start next year, for a first launch in 2029. The scale of the project can be explained by the pace required to put computing constellations into orbit.
The link with AI is explicit: SpaceX and Nvidia have designed a Vera Rubin NVL72 system adapted to spaceflight, which is scheduled to be put into orbit in the fourth quarter of next year with a scale-up in 2028. The company also says it relies on these processors for the orchestration, code execution and data processing of its next generation of agentic AI. Turning coastal marshes into a launch base at this rate, however, raises environmental questions that have not yet been resolved.
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