SpaceX's Plan to Build the World's Biggest Spaceport Could Be an Environmental Disaster

Months of speculation about SpaceX’s interest in a large plot of Louisiana marshland have finally come to an end. On Tuesday, the company unveiled its plan to build an enormous spaceport in Vermillion Parish on the state’s Gulf Coast, near the unincorporated community of Pecan Island. Environmentalists are already sounding the alarm. Just before Governor Jeff Landry announced the $100 billion project, the Louisiana Wildlife Federation, National Wildlife Federation, and Pontchartrain Conservancy filed comments on regulatory changes proposed by the Federal Aviation Administration on July 30. The advocacy groups argue that these changes would remove environmental review requirements for the spaceport’s development, putting wildlife, habitat, water, and coastal resources at risk. “For a state whose most significant emerging spaceport site sits within 136,000 acres of coastal marsh in Vermilion Parish, among the most productive wildlife habitat on the continent, that change is not abstract. It is immediate and local,” they wrote in a letter addressed to FAA Administrator Bryan Bradford on Monday. Gizmodo reached out to SpaceX for comment but did not receive a response by the time of pub