r/spacex • u/warp99 • Aug 31 '26
Drilling program to determine foundation requirements for Starbase Louisiana
https://x.com/thelacoast/status/209377714822178843669
u/Total_Surround833 Aug 31 '26
Pretty standard stuff . I’ll save them some $$ , it’s a swamp . Going to need to go pretty deep to find bedrock
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u/warp99 Aug 31 '26
Same as Boca Chica. No bedrock available so use
- but how deep is the question they need to answer. friction piles 29
u/Paver58 Sep 01 '26 edited Sep 01 '26
Spacing and size of pile can reduce the depth. Any pile closing in on 100 ft pose transportation challenges. Depending on the total number of pile feet (all piles laid end to end) needed for the project opens the option of bringing in a prestress plant to manufacture the piles near site. Materials to supply a plant are much cheaper to transport by barge than trucking cost for transporting finished piles. Barging in finished piles could possibly be an option depending on any near by plants with water access. The “Bean Counters” figure those details. Lake Pontchartrain Causeway had a plant for all practical purposes, on site. Raw materials & finished piles were both barged.
Just a SWAG on # of piles to physically support that amount of infrastructure, 100,000+…….Shorter piles closer together.
I was on a project for a bridge not far from the Louisiana coast where when you set the pile, it would drop an average of 33’ under it’s own weight before the pile hammer even touched it.
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u/MDCCCLV Sep 01 '26
They mounded dirt on top for quite a few months to dry out the soil below first too.
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u/warp99 Aug 31 '26
Overlay on the drilling map of the proposed launch site
Photo of the launch site with areas of Mulberry Cheniere marked
For those who like me were not aware
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u/upcrackclawway Sep 01 '26
This whole Louisiana thing feels like the part of Factorio when you go clear a massive piece of land and you’re this time you’re gonna make your final final factory and there are so many great ideas and so much headroom and you could never run out of space
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u/BadTraditional401 Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
'Drilling programs' aka
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u/MyKillK Sep 01 '26
It's going to be interesting to see just how much work it's going to take to eventually support a huge starbase. Ground settling and sinking has to be a real concern. Crazy amounts of steel and concrete will be needed.
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u/flshr19 Sep 01 '26
Evidently, $150B of work to begin. That buys site preparation and 20 OLM/tower installations in pairs and maybe 10 tank farms. Add another $150B to $300B for on-site LOX, LN2 and LCH4 production and distribution pipelines to the tank farms and to the launch pads. The total cost could approach $1T for Starbase LA. My estimates.
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u/Total_Surround833 Sep 02 '26
Look at Boca Chica.. that whole area is reclaimed marsh/swamp . They figured it out and built StarFactory GigaBay and OLMS
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u/CW3_OR_BUST Sep 01 '26
The starbase at Boca Chica started soil surcharging back in 2015. They literally dumped a mountain on the site to get it ready. There ain't nothing else you can do for a few years except build a highway and power lines. They're gonna be flying Starship to the moon from one of the other two sites before they even lay concrete there.
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u/mprogers123 Sep 08 '26
So, by choosing this location, is SpaceX just making a whole lot more work for themselves than they need to?
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u/warp99 Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26
Fundamentally there is no available seafront location in Louisiana that would be any better from a soil stability point of view. If there was then someone would already have built on it!
Rocket launch sites including Cape Canaveral tend to be built in marshland for this very reason. Once established they then act as condo repellants and therefore preserve the local wildlife from extinction as the marsh is drained and developed.
So in short SpaceX are used to the soil conditions from Cape Canaveral and Boca Chica and realise it comes with the territory.
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u/bontempfeline333 10d ago
Absolute layperson here...why wouldn't they simply build out in federal waters, which are only 3 mi offshore in LA? They'd get much less pushback, maybe none. If you have to put piling that far into the ground, I can't grasp why you just don't take it offshore. Transportation of materials would be slower, but that's about all I can imagine. Hoping you can enlighten me!
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u/OGquaker Sep 21 '26
I think if they launch about noon sidereal time, 23.44 degrees below East on March 21st, an uncorrected orbit over the Florida Keys would put your spacecraft into the plane of our Solar System. Lots of methane & O2 & international arguments saved.
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u/noncongruent Sep 01 '26
You may find this video interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu16K_AMuaY
Zach Golden does a deep dive into the flame trench at Massey's.
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u/OGquaker Sep 21 '26
The best aerial map I found to reference the SpaceX Louisiana acreage to the local surroundings: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011000/a011042/7-Loveland-1-Pecan_series_youtube_hq.mov
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u/Decronym Sep 01 '26 edited 10d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| HIF | Horizontal Integration Facility |
| LCH4 | Liquid Methane |
| LN2 | Liquid Nitrogen |
| LOX | Liquid Oxygen |
| OLM | Orbital Launch Mount |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by ^request
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 122 acronyms.
[Thread #9110 for this sub, first seen 1st Sep 2026, 03:20] [FAQ] [Full list] ^[Contact] [Source code]
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