Buy the land. Achieve reliability that makes flyover a lesser concern. No one thinks twice about a 737. If you fail then sell the land for a profit.

Gulf states are going to end up being the global center for space.

Austin Texas - Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is looking in Williamson County, northeast of Austin, for land to build a 1.3 million-square-foot manufacturing and research complex. The project would create more than 2,000 jobs near Hutto, Texas. https://t.co/n5yNz51Ji2

— George Kiefer (@GeorgeKiefer) May 13, 2026

hph6203 said:

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Buy the land. Achieve reliability that makes flyover a lesser concern. No one thinks twice about a 737. If you fail then sell the land for a profit.

Gulf states are going to end up being the global center for space.

Austin Texas - Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is looking in Williamson County, northeast of Austin, for land to build a 1.3 million-square-foot manufacturing and research complex. The project would create more than 2,000 jobs near Hutto, Texas. https://t.co/n5yNz51Ji2

— George Kiefer (@GeorgeKiefer) May 13, 2026

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Looks like Central Texas is really benefiting.

nortex97 said:

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So, umm, maybe I am just being obtuse about this, but starship launches from Louisiana??

SpaceX is considering several locations domestically and internationally to build the world’s most advanced spaceports! https://t.co/QCXwztAjr2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2026

That seems pretty crazy to me, and would require significant overflight of populated areas of Texas as well for upper stage re-entries.

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I believe the plan for the LA location is to be a place where they BUILT but did not launch ships and boosters. The advantage of that location is it has access to the intercoastal waterway, and SpaceX would have to transport said ships and boosters on barges because they are two large to move otherwise. From that location they can get to their (current) launch sites in both Texas and Florida, via the intercoastal waterway.

Starship should fly themselves from the factory to their launch site.

SpaceX hasn't even directly acknowledged that they are looking at that particular site, much less what they'd do there. The rumor, though credible, came from a local real estate broker's own analysis.

I think those SpaceX/Elon tweets are meant to say "We're looking at a lot of things. Don't bet YOUR farm on any particular one to pan out for any particular purpose."

nortex97 said:

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I'm referencing return/landing trajectories for the upper stage. Not many great options there to get to sea level on the Louisiana coast.

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I am guessing that this site would primarily be a polar sun-synchronous orbital trajectory launching south. My understanding is that this is the intended orbit of the in-orbit data centers projects. This maximizes the solar power/radiant emission cooling efficiency. Starship variants are likely going to be deployable as data center modules with no intent on return to the Pelican Island site. If they needed to return a ship from this orbit there is no reason they couldn't land on a drone ship and sail it back to site.

That's not consistent with the reusable economics of Starship and SpaceX's design renders show those satellites as a folded pez deployable style like oversized Starlink satellites.

terafab.ai

Decay said:

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nortex97 said:

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I'm referencing return/landing trajectories for the upper stage. Not many great options there to get to sea level on the Louisiana coast.

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Ah gotcha. Well maybe it's like commercial air travel. Once it's proven enough you're willing to make some exceptions?

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I think this is the bigger point about future overflights of populated areas. No one wanted to stand at either end of the runway when the first commercial jet made its first test flight landing. Now we've 767s clipping highway traffic on landing approach and it's an "oops, we'll look into how that happened" situation, not a "ground all related airframes" situation.

Ok, that would make sense too I guess. Above my pay grade. I just figure the re-entries near Houston/central Texas and associated sonic booms for 'normal' re-entries would be problematic, but I depend on people smarter than me to figure this stuff out.

Posted by CS Councilman Yancy on the Aggieland Board.

I agree. Starship aims to make mass to orbit cheap. So it's likely the data center components will be deployable payload with returning ships. There are two solutions to upper stage reentry. One is drone ship landings but that is settling. The other is the dynamic banking which they proved in the last test flight where they were able to turn the vehicle and dramatically change its landing approach azimuth. So the path over populated areas can be manipulated some. I don't see too much issue with them bringing the ship in over the Atchafalaya basin on the way to pelican island. Polar orbit would have a somewhat western trajectory anyway so they may not have to do much banking by bringing it in over 'de swamp'.