Governor Landry will announce next Tuesday that Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to build a multi-billion-dollar spaceport in Vermilion Parish.
The Advocate reports the spaceport would be built on 130 acres of coastal marshland near Pecan Island, about 45 miles southwest of Lafayette, and would launch rockets into orbit.
The project could potentially bring thousands of jobs to Louisiana.
“From what I’m hearing, it’s going to be a bigger deal in terms of capital expenditure and employment and just the overall impact than the Meta deal in Richland Parish,” says Advocate reporter Stephanie Riegel.
Local leaders are understandably ecstatic over the expected announcement, saying the spaceport could transform the entire region.
“It’s like much of Louisiana – they’ve lost people, and they don’t have a lot of good-paying jobs,” Riegel says.
As part of the deal, a decade-long coastal damages lawsuit filed by Vermilion Parish and the state against ExxonMobil has been dismissed.
Riegel says more details will be announced Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. in Abbeville.
“At the very least, SpaceX is going to have to build some kind of facility to protect its launch pad and whatever other infrastructure it puts in place,” says Riegel.
SpaceX and Landry have not commented.
Musk says the company needs more launch sites to support its goal of deploying up to a million Starlink satellites.
There have been whispers about the proposed project for weeks, and Riegel says there are many in Vermilion Parish concerned about what this will mean for their way of life.
“There is a lot of concern in environmental circles,” Riegel says. “There is a lot of concern, I think, from the people that are in the immediate Pecan Island community.”
The area is popular for recreational hunting and fishing.
“Those people, I think, are devastated,” says Riegel. “They’re really upset.”