This report was originally published by The Current. a nonprofit news organization serving Lafayette and South Louisiana. 

Bennett Billeaud, who just finished his freshman year at St. Thomas More High School, has been hunting on the marsh near Pecan Island for as long as he can remember. So when he heard rumors that a space company was eyeing the land for development, he grew deeply worried.

“I was devastated,” Billeaud says.

The speculation that SpaceX was interested in buying a large plot of land in the marsh began circulating on social media over the past few weeks, but became more concrete when state Sen. Bob Hensgens, R-Abbeville, who represents the area, confirmed May 7 that a “space exploration company” was discussing the potential purchase of 136,000 acres of land owned by Exxon-Mobil.

Hunters like Billeaud, as well as some residents and environmental groups, are concerned about the impact large-scale industrial development would have on one of the few stretches of Louisiana coastline not yet lined with smokestacks.

To express his concern, the 15-year-old Billeaud wrote a letter to the president of Vermilion Corp, P. R. Burke, outlining why he holds the marsh so dearly and asking for the company to support hunters like him in any potential fight over the land. Vermilion Corp. and its predecessors have managed the land for hunting purposes for over 100 years.

Burke explained that any rumored acquisition would be out of his control, so Billeaud and his family decided to try and get some answers on their own. But they quickly hit a roadblock: non-disclosure agreements.

“Anyone who knows anything important is under an NDA, so it has been hard for us to get real information,” Billeaud says.

Under Gov. Jeff Landry, the state has aggressively pursued NDAs for anyone involved in matters of economic development, such as representatives and state senators in districts where large corporations like Meta are pursuing industrial projects, effectively shielding them from public scrutiny.

Notably, Hensgens told The Acadiana Advocate he did not sign an NDA because he didn’t believe it was in the public’s best interest.

But the cat had been out of the bag before Hensgens confirmed that negotiations were underway.

On April 30, Lafayette real estate agent Jim Keaty published a blog post outlining his research, mostly based on conversations with government officials, Pecan Island locals, energy insiders and hunting-lease holders.

Keaty began looking into this rumor in April after receiving calls from concerned residents in the area. He also owns a hunting camp on the land in question.

There are conflicting reports about whether hunting leases are being cancelled or renewed through Jan. 1, 2027. True or not, residents are not going to sell their land easily.

“Everyone is taking their property off of the market,” Keaty said. Should the rumors come true, property owners can angle for more compensation for their land.

A space frenzy in Baton Rouge

While the deal was taking shape quietly, Baton Rouge was moving fast. Several bills that have moved through the Legislature appear tailored toward creating a highly permissive — and thereby welcoming — environment for a space company looking to enter the state.

During the current legislative session, which ends June 1, a package of at least six House bills has moved through the Legislature with little public debate. No particular company was named in any of the bills, but only a few companies, chief among them Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, would qualify for the full slate of protections and benefits.

The most consequential is House Bill 1071, sponsored by Rep. Jack McFarland, R-Jonesboro, which is enrolled, meaning it’s passed both chambers and is awaiting the governor’s signature.

The bill exempts from Louisiana’s public records law any “blueprints, plans, designs, technical data, operational documents, security information,” and related records tied to aerospace facilities, if the company holds a U.S. Department of Defense contract or maintains information under International Traffic in Arms Regulations. SpaceX holds both.

Once signed, the bill would permanently shield the kinds of records most relevant to understanding how such deals were structured, including potential tax benefits, environmental data and outlined safety features for facilities.

Other bills in the package extend that protection across multiple legal fronts. House Bill 1033, sponsored by Rep. Tony Bacala, R-Prairieville, adds spaceports and aerospace facilities to Louisiana’s definition of “critical infrastructure,” making unauthorized entry a felony.

HB 1098 and HB 1099, both sponsored by McFarland, bar nuisance, trespass and noise complaints against aerospace operators and void any injunctive relief that might slow their activities. HB 1179, sponsored by Bacala, creates a property tax exemption for aerospace manufacturing facilities. HB 1175, sponsored by Rep. Chris Turner, R-Ruston, establishes new statewide definitions for “aerospace facility,” “aerospace flight activities” and “aerospace flight entity” — terms that the rest of the package then applies.

“We have to position ourselves to be economically competitive with neighboring states,” McFarland said at a 2026 legislative hearing.

There’s an economic case to be made for the deal, as Keaty points out in his report.

In Brownsville, Texas, SpaceX’s arrival at Boca Chica generated more than $13 billion in regional economic output and roughly 24,000 jobs within five years, according to regional economic data from the Rio Grande Valley. Median home prices in Cameron County, where the facility is located, tripled.

Southwest Louisiana — with its marine fabrication workforce, LNG infrastructure in Cameron Parish and the Port of Iberia — is positioned to absorb a similar wave. HB 1088, one of the bills in the legislative package, requires any aerospace facility receiving state tax rebates to create at least 200 permanent jobs and commit $1 billion in new capital investment.

But the explosive growth could spell trouble for longtime residents. In the Rio Grande Valley, property values rose so quickly that families who had owned land for generations were priced out of their own communities, Keaty points out in his report.

Further, nearly 60 Rio Grande Valley households filed suit against SpaceX in April 2026 alleging structural damage to their homes from sonic booms and rocket exhaust — cracked walls, shattered windows — according to court filings reported by the McAllen Monitor.

Two of the bills already enrolled in Baton Rouge, HB 1098 and HB 1099, would eliminate the legal tools those Texas families are using should Louisiana residents see their quality of life harmed by a space company’s operations.

What happened to communities near Boca Chica happened on fewer than 100 acres. For the Vermilion Parish project, the parties involved are reportedly discussing a footprint 1,360 times that size.

Although this land in Louisiana has never been home to an aerospace company, it does have a history of being used for industrial purposes and left in worse condition.

History repeats itself

Jason Theriot knows this land’s history better than almost anyone. He was commissioned by Vermilion Corp. to write its official corporate history, drawing on a century of internal records, board minutes and oral histories. His 2018 book, “Great Game Paradise: A History of Vermilion Corporation” was published by University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press.

Predictions on the environmental impacts of industrial activity in the very same marsh have been ignored in the past, to the area’s detriment, he says.

“The team of scientists and experts who were brought in by Vermilion Corp. to report on the potential impacts to the marsh and wildlife from dredging the ship channel, and to recommend alternative routes — their predictions were correct but had no bearing on the ultimate route selection,” he says.

The same thing happened with similar projects on other parts of the state’s coast.

The coastal scientists, wildlife biologists and hydrologists brought on by Vermilion Corp. in 1958 to analyze the effects of dredging a deepwater navigation channel south of Pecan Island predicted a severe reduction in wintering waterfowl and salt water intrusion into fresh marsh, one of the main culprits behind Louisiana’s ongoing rapid land loss.

They proposed alternative routes. Their data, Theriot writes, “essentially shot holes in the [U.S. Corps of Engineers] estimates.”

None of it mattered. Political momentum — driven by Louisiana’s congressional delegation, the Abbeville Chamber of Commerce, the offshore oil industry — overrode the science. The Freshwater Bayou Channel was dug, and within years, exactly as predicted, the fresh marsh was converted to a tidal estuary, and decades of expensive restoration followed.