The company plans to pour concrete faster than Louisiana can swallow it, and the porches will pay the difference.
A field study finds the ground under SpaceX's planned $100 billion Louisiana spaceport sinks fourteen inches a year. SpaceX has budgeted to pour fifteen inches of concrete annually and stay ahead of the swamp forever. The real emergency, the researchers say, is that launch vibration will tilt every porch within fourteen miles by half a degree.
"—and by Friday morning the theodolite was gone, so we stopped asking the ground to hold anything," my field technician told me at the boat launch. A theodolite is a tool for checking whether things are level. Ours belongs to the mud now.
My team released its findings on Friday. The ground under SpaceX's planned Louisiana spaceport sinks fourteen inches a year. SpaceX read our report, thanked us, and added one line to the budget. They intend to pour fifteen inches of concrete a year and call the difference progress.
The company will spend up to $100 billion on the site. That is a large number. Numbers get large. I checked the arithmetic and it holds. The company calls it a project like no other. This is the boring part of the story and I will not dwell on it.
We spent a year in waders to reach these findings. We also watched a parish with no spaceport in it. That parish was our control group. A control group is the place where nothing happens. Nothing happened there. Science worked.
The sinking itself does not frighten me. An engineer can feed a swamp forever, as long as the invoices clear.
The swamp accepts steel. It does not give steel back. Both parties seem comfortable with the arrangement.
The porches frighten me. Our instruments show launch vibration will tilt every porch within fourteen miles by half a degree. A porch is where Louisiana happens. Half a degree ends that. We measured fourteen porches to confirm it. The sample size was adequate. It was not.
The chance the porch finding is a fluke sits below one in twenty. That is the bar my field uses. The bar felt low this time, so I went back on a second Friday and measured again. The porches had already started leaning.
Rocking chairs will drift south while at rest. Iced tea will hold a slope. A careful scientist hedges, so here is my hedge: we cannot rule out a full degree. Nobody's chair sits still after a full degree.
A SpaceX site planner stayed calm when I briefed him. "The swamp takes fourteen inches and we pour fifteen," he said. "We come out ahead forever. The porches sit outside the fence line, and therefore outside physics." I told him that is not how physics works. He wrote that down.
My report ends with one recommendation. Build on rock. Louisiana declined to contain any. SpaceX has broken ground anyway, or rather, the ground has agreed to open. I have moved my own chair indoors, and I suggest the parish do the same.
