Cathie Wood-led ARK Invest‘s Chief Futurist Brett Winton has weighed in on why Elon Musk and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) are heavily investing in building a second Starbase spaceport in Louisiana.
Starbase Will Feature Multiple Starship Towers
According to an investor note released by ARK on Monday, Winton said that the Starbase in Louisiana was a $100 billion commitment spanning roughly 125,000 acres at Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish and will feature five complexes, each equipped with two Starship towers.
It will start with ten launch pads and eventually expand to over a dozen towers supporting around 30 flights per day, Winton said, touting on-site propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping, vehicle processing, employee housing, and likely an airport.
He also pointed to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who said that SpaceX’s current capacity cannot accommodate Starship’s intended launch cadence.
ARK Invest anticipates this capacity will serve payloads worth trillions of dollars annually, starting with billions for Starlink and trillions for the Starmind AI constellation. Per ARK’s estimates, a single reusable Starlink-loaded Starship flight could generate about $4 billion in lifetime net cash flow against $1 billion in launch, satellite manufacturing, ground station, and acquisition costs, he wrote in the investor note.
An Opportunity Larger Than ARK Can Model
Taking to X on Monday, Winton expanded upon the note as he quoted an earlier post he made that detailed Starbase’s cost coming in just behind Gov. Gavin Newsom‘s (D-CA) California High Speed Rail Project, but it was for a reason. “We think this [Starlink] opportunity scales into the hundreds of billions of dollars before returns begin to decay,” Winton said in the post.
He added that the commercial space flight company was “going after a larger connectivity opportunity than we currently mode,” outlining SpaceX’s claimed $1.6 trillion opportunity compared to ARK’s $600 billion figure.
“Starbase Louisiana is massively overbuilt for just serving connectivity,” he said. “The reason to build so big: the AI opportunity can compound at much larger scale,” Winton added.
“We think cost per GW on earth moves north of $60b per GW in 2029 and crosses $76b in 2032,” he said, talking about terrestrial data center costs per Gigawatt and how SpaceX’s AI satellites could weigh 2,000 kg each, while citing Starlink’s per-satellite cost of $1000/kg.
“We also know that cost of launch will fall to something south of $100 per kg all-in if they can make Starship reuseable,” he said. He added that this could translate to SpaceX launching satellites for $38 billion per GW.
In the same thread, he outlined that “after the 100th launch of its AI satellites,” SpaceX will have brought the costs down to $32 billion per GW. “SpaceX should enjoy an undeniable cost advantage over every other player,” he said, but warned monetization could become a challenge.
Price Action: SPCX shares fell 0.91% to $143.29 during pre-market trading on Tuesday.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by a Benzinga editor.
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