The amount spent on that hideous boondoggle, California High Speed Rail,* seems more and more trivial by the day.
SpaceX on Tuesday unveiled plans to construct a massive, $100 billion spaceport in Louisiana, where the company plans to launch its gargantuan Starship rocket thousands of times per year.
The new SpaceX campus will be dubbed “Starbase, Louisiana” — borrowing the name of SpaceX’s recently incorporated company town in South Texas. Starbase, Texas, is the current home to Starship’s testing and development facilities and the spot from which 13 test flights have launched to varying degrees of success.
The Louisiana location, however, would host flights of the Starship rocket once its operational, having proven it can safely haul cargo to orbit. SpaceX also plans to land and recover every piece of its Starship rockets — including the upper spacecraft, which has never been done before — in order to allow the rockets to be rapidly reused and drive down the cost of each launch.
And, yes, subsidy truffle pig and federal contract vaccum Elon is going to be spending a lot of public money on this, directly and indirectly.
Credit to CNN for the bolded (by me) bit.
*Yes of course there are plenty of things to criticize about that project - spending a lot of money to try to appease its critics who then criticize it even more is one - but the huge number attached sounds less and less scary in context!