News broke recently of rumors of a space company looking to buy up like a couple hundred square miles of land in Louisiana, possibly to set up a launch site.
Why Louisiana?
Two reasons:
1. Launch site advantages
Louisiana is one of the very few pro-industrial-development locations with a coastline suitable for polar orbit launches. This is required for SpaceX’s AI satellite constellation in sun-synchronous orbit. A viable launch path for polar orbits exists from Louisiana.
2. Proximity to cheap energy
It is located right next to the Henry Hub, the primary U.S. benchmark for natural gas pricing.
Current price: under $3/MMBTU
→ under $3/Gigajoule
→ under 1 cent/kWh-thermal
Direct connection to this pipeline network would allow SpaceX to:
- Undercut the cost of trucking LNG
- Beat typical delivered industrial rates for U.S. electrical power plants
- Achieve energy cheaper per unit than Appalachian coal
For all intents and purposes, it is the cheapest source of energy humanity has access to — other than starting a coal mine on fire.
Starship v4 propellant requirements (approximate)
- First stage: 4050 t of propellant
- Second stage: 2300 t of propellant
Total propellant: ~6350 t
→ to deliver >200 t of payload to orbit
Based on these figures for Starship V4:
Propellant-to-payload ratio
Ratio of propellant mass to LEO payload mass = 31.75
Raptor engine mixture ratio
Oxidizer-to-Fuel (O:F) ratio = 3.6 by mass
(Design goal was 3.8; future operations may approach this.)
Propellant breakdown (per 1 t LEO payload)
- Methane (CH₄): 6.9 t
- Oxygen (O₂): 24.85 t
Total propellant: 6.9 t + 24.85 t = 31.75 t
Energy calculation
High-Heating-Value (HHV) of methane = 55.5 MJ/kg
Energy content of the methane used per kg to orbit:
Cost implications
This energy figure alone suggests raw fuel costs on the order of ~$1/kg to orbit.
However, real-world propellant costs include substantial overhead:
- Purification of natural gas (byproducts such as butane and propane are often more valuable than methane, which can offset some costs)
- Liquefaction of methane
- Liquefaction of oxygen
- Subcooling of both propellants for rocket loading
- Chill-down losses for the vehicle and ground support equipment
Realistic target
If liquefaction equipment is built on-site (as SpaceX is now explicitly doing per environmental permits), total propellant costs to orbit could reach the range of ~$2–3/kg.
Launch vehicles are just elaborate machines for turning chemical energy into payload kinetic energy. The best launch vehicles are on the order of 10% efficient at doing this. Just like a power plant, an aluminum smelter, or a data center, it makes sense to put such a machine as close as possible to the cheapest source of energy.
Chris Stelter
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Excellent and informative read. This is my first time on this site, but I’ll be coming back for more.
Louisiana still that the launch limitations of Texas. There’s a very constrained flight path both from and any orbital return to the site. All that seems to recommend it is access to fuel. Propellants are not the highest cost items for launches although the size and proposed cadence of Starship might stretch that truism.
Launching from the West and East coasts of the US gives a nearly unlimited access to any orbit and a way to recover rockets in a way that provides for much safer aborts into an ocean.