SpaceX plans to begin next month building an eight-mile (13-km) natural gas pipeline called “Starpipe” to its Texas launch facilities, according to county filings, as Elon Musk’s company seeks to ramp up launches of its next-generation Starship rocket.
Starpipe, which will end at SpaceX’s Texas company town of Starbase, is expected to be in service by January 26, according to a document filed last month with the Texas Railroad Commission by SpaceX affiliate Lone Star Mineral Development and reviewed by Reuters.
The pipeline plan, previously reported by Rio Grande Valley Business Journal, signals Musk’s intent to accelerate Starship’s development and lay the groundwork for a faster flight rate. The 40-story rocket is central to SpaceX’s push to expand its Starlink broadband network, deploy orbital AI data center satellites, and eventually carry astronauts to the moon and Mars.
Designed to be fully reusable, Starship uses about 630,000 gallons (2.4 million liters) of liquid methane per launch, currently delivered by hundreds of tanker trucks in an hours-long process incompatible with Musk’s expansion plans. Starship has completed 12 test launches since 2023, but Musk aims to ramp up to dozens, hundreds and eventually thousands of launches a year.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
SPACEX’S BIG GAS PLANS
Though it is unusual for a space company to build its own natural gas pipeline for launchpad fuel, Starpipe might only be an initial step in a longer-term plan for SpaceX, which has spent years exploring its own drilling operations near Starbase and throughout Texas, according to a Reuters review of Cameron County land records.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC on June 12, when the company went public, that the company planned to build pipelines and process its own propellant, and was looking into drilling its own natural gas.
Extracting natural gas would be a challenging pursuit for a company with no oil and gas experience, said Stan Lindsey, an oil and gas consultant in Texas.
“I’m not saying it’s beyond the realm of possibility … it’s possible they got a really nice prospect,” Lindsey said. But if those drilling plans fall short, he added, “they’ve got a fallback position” with Starpipe.
SpaceX has signed over 100 paid-up oil and gas leases with Texas property owners since 2023, the land records show.
Starpipe would begin on an 83-acre (34-hectare) piece of land at the Port of Brownsville that SpaceX is in talks to lease from the city for 50 years, a port official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity because the negotiations are private.
Engineering plans SpaceX filed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, included in a public notice issued last August, show SpaceX wants to build a liquefaction facility at Starbase to process the piped-in natural gas into liquid methane.
“Certainly that would make the most efficient sense,” said William Farrar, a longtime oil and gas lawyer in Texas and geoscientist.
The company could tap into Enbridge’s Valley Crossing Pipeline expansion project that would run close to Starpipe’s start point, Lindsey said.
Enbridge did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
SPACEX WANTS TO OWN SUPPLY CHAIN
SpaceX’s move into gas infrastructure, typically the domain of energy and pipeline firms, underscores its longstanding strategy of controlling as much of its supply chain as possible, a capital-intensive approach that has helped the company outpace rivals in rocket and spacecraft development.
The effort positions SpaceX to manage an unusually broad chain of resources, stretching from natural gas deep beneath Earth’s surface to the moon, where Musk wants to use lunar material for AI-focused satellite production, an ambitious and untested goal.
The pipeline’s 16-inch (406-mm) diameter suggests fuel demand exceeding what Starship would require for 25 launches, the annual cadence currently approved by the Federal Aviation Administration.
SpaceX ultimately aims to deploy thousands of solar-powered, AI-focused satellites whose combined energy output could approach one-fifth of the U.S. power grid, according to its initial public offering prospectus.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Joe Brock and Rod Nickel)