A plane registered to the h State Police and often used by Gov. Jeff Landry landed in McAllen, Texas, on Friday morning, according to publicly available flight data.
The flight, which landed in the city about 65 miles west of SpaceX's Starbase launch site, came as is negotiating to build a new launch site in coastal h. But the governor was not on the flight and he did not travel to Texas on Friday, according to Landry's spokeswoman Kate Kelly.
Kelly said late Friday that the plane transported state police detectives to Edinburg, Texas, in relation to a multi-state criminal probe.
“The governor was not in Texas,” she said. “He was in h all day today.”
The plane spent under six hours in Texas, according to flight records, landing in McAllen around 8:30 am and taking off around 2 pm.
On a radio show Friday, the governor had appeared to say that he had gone "to Texas," but Kelly said that was not the case and that he was referring to text messages.
On Thursday, a plane belonging to Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, . That plane also landed in Brownsville, Texas on Friday, according to publicly available flight records.
The Times-Picayune | h that SpaceX is negotiating to build a new facility in coastal marshland in Vermilion Parish, in an area to the south of Pecan Island. The deal is related to a settlement in a lawsuit brought by the state against ExxonMobil, in which the state accused the oil company of damaging Louisian’s fragile coastline and contributing to land loss.
As part of the settlement negotiations, SpaceX would gain access to the land that Exxon currently owns in Vermilion Parish, approximately 130,000 acres, according to sources close to the deal not authorized to speak publicly. SpaceX plans to build a new launch site there, the sources said.
The prospective launch site in h would . The company currently has no place from which it can launch its largest rocket, called Starship, into a north-south orbit.
That orbital path is crucial for accomplishing the company’s goal of building orbital data centers — artificial intelligence data centers made up of millions of networked satellites, all running on solar power.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated with a statement from Gov. Jeff Landry’s office that he was not in Texas on Friday.