Starbase Louisiana

[Yazata]

And how soon until this? Next year?

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[Yazata]

Map of the Starbase Louisiana area. (I don't think that it's exactly to scale.) The white outline is the former Exxon property that SpaceX purchased. I'm not sure, but I think that the red properties have also been purchased by SpaceX from other owners. The Rockefeller National Wildlife Refuge and the White Lake Wetlands on the left and the Audubon Society and State Wildlife Refuge on the right are expected to stay. The little unincorporated community of Pecan Island in the middle, with about 300 largely Cajun residents in various small properties strung out along a road is expected to stay.

The part of the property that SpaceX is expected to develop is marked very roughly by the blue dotted line. The blue dots mark the location where SpaceX says that it is taking core samples according to a local government filing. The launch pads will be along the southern edge towards the Gulf shore, then propellant and deluge tank farms immediately above, and natural gas purification/liquifaction facilities (there's lots of natural gas there, which originally attracted Exxon) and air separation plants (that pull LOX and liquid nitrogen out of the air) above that, closer to Pecan Island. The vertical assembly building and industrial buildings will be to the right, along the Intracoastal Waterway with ship and barge access. There will be an airport and employee housing tucked into the property somewhere, perhaps near the upper right of the dotted line area which would put them near the industrial area and away from the pads.

All in all, the developed part looks to be about 25,000 acres (a very roomy 39 square miles, larger than Manhattan or the city of San Francisco) out of the total 120,000 acre (188 square mile) Exxon property. Given that the pads will be some distance apart, much of the launch area will remain largely undeveloped, albeit very noisy.

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[Yazata]

More closeup of the area to be developed:

The green dots mark where core samples are being drilled at the 10 launch pads in five groups of two, stretched out along 7 1/2 miles of coast.

The purple dots mark where five ground support tank farms will go, one for each two paired pads.

THe red dots mark where other facilities will go. The exxon dock will remain and be developed. Freshwater bayou is currently being dredged to make the Exxon dock better able to unload ocean going ships delivering heavy steel and equipment. A Starship factory might go near the dock slong with a huge vertical assembly building even larger than the Texas and Florida Gigabays. Inevitably, it's being called the Terabay. The red dots up Louisiana highway 3147 (actually a two lane road) indicate additional industrial buildings and employee housing and stuff like that.

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[Yazata]

The guy who made the maps above heard that SpaceX wanted to build a new road to access the site, so he tried connecting the red bore sites together with a line and got this:

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It lines up with the existing road up on Pecan Island and looks very plausible. He even speculated that where it makes a 90 degree turn might be where a new launch operations center for all ten pads might eventually go, since it would have a view of all the pads off in the distance. If you connect the white dots in the same way, you get what might be two more roads, one running along the row of pads and the other along the row of ground support sites, with a connection up to that hypothesized operations center.

He writes:

"At the risk of being labeled a conspiracy theorist, the other day someone commented on my permit map that the other red soil boring locations "are for the access road SpaceX is planning on building". I went ahead and entertained this idea and connected those dots to see what that might look like.

Obviously, there are a lot of advantages to this as the old road is narrow (~25 ft wide), has some pretty tight turns, and bridges that aren't rated for much weight. It will have major upgrades regardless, but building a secondary road straight off the Hwy toward the center of the property makes a lot of sense. They can build it from scratch exactly how they want it and could add an operations building with cross sectional views of the launch area.

Keep in mind that I'm just staring at points on paper and not dirt, concrete, or steel. I have as much knowledge that Spacex is putting mission control here as I do them putting a playground. This is pure speculation until we get some permits filed. Which, by the way, no new CUP's were filed this week on the Base or in Vermilion Parish in general. We wait..."

https://x.com/thelacoast/status/2098484557523911034

One of the replies added this:

"Soil borings are the one signal that can't be walked back — nobody pays for geotech along a corridor they don't intend to build on. Permit filings leak intent months before press releases do."

And somebody asked what's with the small squares labelled "School Board"? @thelacoast replied "Old LA law setting aside the 16th section of almost every township for public schools."