I'm more interested in how they plan to build this out in an engineering sense of things. The land out there is awful for construction. The soils just keep being awful the further you go down. Bedrock is absurdly deep, like Mt. Everest tall deep.
People might notice there is nothing on the coast out there! People LOVE waterfronts and this place ain't got one. There is a reason for this.
Around the New Orleans area it sure is tough:
How far do building engineers have to go to reach bedrock under New Orleans?
The launch complex is further west, so somewhat away from the Mississippi River. Bedrock might be closer there. I would assume they have some kind of plan to deal with it.
No, it's not. It is near one of the former Mississippi delta, and alluvial deposition out there is millions of years in the works, not merely the Mississippi.
I also doubt they have "some plan to deal with it". Musk saw the potential based on how dirt cheap the land is and said 'we'll do it there!'
Louisiana is around #49 or 50 when it comes to the states with the highest poverty rates. They need a boost, and I hope this endevour can help.
I find it hard to argue with that. People will hate Musk and maybe rightly so for a number of reasons, but this isn't one of them.
Meanwhile, the
Gulf Coast is sinking. Because the ground is so crap, it can't support itself!
Maybe?
Not maybe. The ground sucks, is consolidating
and dropping due to widescale global tectonic stuff. On the average magnitude of 1 inch every three years. In the biz, that is way too much for roadway or a bridge or a building, forget about launch pads.
Before committing to such a large project and investment SpaceX would know what it can and can't do with respect to physical construction. Can you say with any factual basis that what they plan to do is impossible?
The problem with remediating the area is that the consolidation runs deep, and the Arctic, which has less ice is rebounding, which is also causing Louisiana to settle. Which means, you can't just mat up a fix, because everything under the mat is also sinking. Nothing is impossible, but I can't fathom how they can build roads out there to transit the rockets, forget about launch platforms.
It's safe to say that Elon Musk and his teams didn't just show up in Louisiana on a larf, get wasted on Bourbon Street, and come to the overall conclusion of, "Fuck it, why not? This place is fun!"
You are talking about the guy that forced the Cybertruck on the planet. Musk isn't a viable visionary, he has capital that's it. He has a couple good ideas and then thinks ALL of his ideas are good. SpaceX is sending lots of rockets into space, great! But he wants to go to Mars to have people live on a rock with air you can't breath... not great.
He sees an area untapped and really cheap, not bothering for a second to understand why the Gulf Coast in Louisiana is untapped and cheap. Short of locating a launch facility on a volcano, I'm having difficulties thinking of a worse place in the US to suggest putting a huge array of rocket launch pads at.
And we haven't even got to the part about flooding!
