Tabasco on Every Table, on Mars

TO O N T , O N | AI, Cajun Navy, Innovation, SpaceX

A pepper sauce from a salt dome island in Iberia Parish sits on tables in every restaurant on Earth. That wasn't an accident. Neither is what happens next. Walk into a diner in Tokyo, a café in Nairobi, a truck stop in Nebraska, and there's a good chance you'll find the same little bottle with the diamond label. Tabasco is made on Avery Island, Louisiana — a salt dome rising out of the marsh — and it conquered every table on the planet without a single soldier. That's what Louisiana culture does. It doesn't get diluted when it travels. It travels because it's undiluted. So when I hear that SpaceX is coming to the Louisiana coast, and I hear my neighbors calling it "Le Grand Re-arrangement" — a second exile, history repeating — I want to offer another way to see it. Not a naive way. My family has more standing than most to fear history repeating itself, and I'll get to that. But I believe we are looking at the largest opportunity South Louisiana has been handed in a century, and I believe the culture everyone is afraid of losing is actually the spine of the entire operation. I've earned my worry the hard way I'm a thirteenth-generation Gaudet. My ancestors were Acadians — farmers who were rounded up in 1755, imprisoned at Fort Cumberland, exiled through Miquelon and France, and who finally put down roots on Bayou Lafourche. When people invoke the Grand Dérangement in this debate, they're invoking my family's actual story. I own my great-

great-great-grandmother's tomb in Thibodaux. I don't take displacement lightly. It's written into my name. And I've seen what the water can take. In 2016, when 150,000 homes flooded across South Louisiana, I founded what became the Cajun Navy Ground Force — ordinary citizens, boats, and technology, organizing tens of thousands of rescue missions when the systems around us were overwhelmed. Afterward, I hosted the only television show produced about the 2016 Great Louisiana Flood and the land loss devouring our coast. Here it is: The show I hosted on the 2016 Great Louisiana Flood and the land loss along our coast. Louisiana loses an acre of land roughly every 15 minutes. Not every hurricane season — every quarter hour, while you're reading this. We have known this for decades. We have mourned it, documented it, and watched the funding to fix it arrive in trickles. What we have never had is a trillion-dollar reason for the world to care whether this coast survives. Now we do. This isn't a launchpad. It's a port. New Orleans was once the richest city in the world. Not because of what we grew — because of what flowed through us. Every bale of cotton, every barrel, every fortune between the Appalachians and the Rockies passed through our port. Geography made us the front door of a continent. SpaceRip Flooding: A Planet in Crisis | Mutant Weather 105+106 Flooding: A Planet in Crisis | Mutant Weather 105+106 Watch on

Think of SpaceX the same way. This is not a rocket pad. It's a port — the front door to everything off this planet. It's not just astronauts. It's autonomous vehicles, solar arrays, battery systems, robotics that will build habitats on other worlds, self-driving machines for distances no human can drive. Every one of those technologies gets developed, tested, and supplied somewhere — and the somewhere is here. Who knows what we find out there that comes right back home to Louisiana, the way river wealth once did. And here's the part the pessimists miss: an operation that valuable cannot afford to lose the ground it stands on. They will invest in new ways to protect their infrastructure from erosion and hurricane surge — and those innovations will spread across South Louisiana, protecting the entire coast from the land loss we've been powerless to stop. Global visibility plus massive investment is the exact formula our coast has begged for since before I was born. This is a real chance to stop the loss. Maybe the only one we'll ever get at this scale. The culture is the spine Here's what I know about the people of this coast, from my own bloodline outward. Before there was a NASA, my Acadian ancestors were terraforming. They built aboiteaux — hand-made wooden sluice dikes — and turned the salt marshes of the Bay of Fundy into farmland below sea level. Engineering a settlement in an environment that wants to kill you is not new to us. It is literally the family business, four hundred years running. My mother's people, the Millers, fled Galveston after the 1900 hurricane with nothing, landed in Lake Charles, and spent the next century building it — churches, hospitals, bridges, schools rebuilt after Audrey. Louisiana people don't just survive catastrophe. We metabolize it into construction. And in 2016, when the water came, nobody waited for permission. Neighbors got in boats. We turned Facebook posts into rescue dispatches. The world learned the phrase "Cajun Navy" because this culture's first instinct in a crisis is allons — let's go. Resourcefulness in hostile environments. Community that outlasts empires. Making a feast out of what's on hand. Tell me that isn't the exact skill set of interplanetary settlement. The engineers coming here will learn what every visitor learns: you can't work on this coast without being changed by it. They'll eat the food. They'll hear the music. Their kids will grow up saying "cher." And when crews finally sit down to their first supper on another world, I promise you somebody's grandmother will have tucked a bottle of Tabasco into the cargo manifest, and somebody will be figuring out how to make a roux in a galley kitchen at one-third gravity. Last time, we weren't at the table

In 1755, an empire made a decision about my ancestors' land, and my ancestors were not in the room. That is the real lesson of the Grand Dérangement — not that change comes, but that we were absent when it was decided. The answer to that history is not to flee again, and it's not to curse the tide. It's to be in the room this time. Demand the environmental safeguards. Fight for the fishermen and the marsh. Hold every promise to account. But do it from a seat at the table, as the people whose culture this whole operation will run on. Louisiana fed a continent from its port once. Now we get a front-row seat to the entire globe's human space exploration — Mars, and interplanetary settlement beyond it. Kind of a big deal. The wealth of the river age flowed through New Orleans. The wealth of the space age can flow through this coast — if we claim our place in it instead of mourning it in advance. The Citizen Action Plan Let me be straight about what my neighbors are worried about, because the worries are legitimate. This is one of the last stretches of our coast not lined with smokestacks. The land in question — some 130,000 acres of marsh around Pecan Island — holds generational hunting and fishing grounds families have leased and loved for a century. Folks are hearing almost nothing from Baton Rouge or their parish courthouses while barges move and legislation flies. The bills moving through the legislature could narrow citizens' legal remedies just as federal environmental reviews are being weakened. And down at Boca Chica, the arrival of a spaceport brought billions in economic output and tens of thousands of jobs — while home prices tripled and families who'd held land for generations got priced out of their own communities. Every one of those concerns is real. And not one of them is answered by throwing up your hands and complaining on Facebook. If you're against this — especially if you're against this — your opposition is only worth something if it shows up where decisions get made. Complaint is not a strategy. Presence is. Here's the plan: Show Up Get in the room where it happens. A project like this triggers public processes — FAA environmental review, Army Corps of Engineers permits, coastal use permits, parish council and police jury meetings, CPRA hearings. Every one has a public comment period, and comments on the record must be answered. Sign up for the notices. Attend the town halls, and if there are no town halls, demand them from your senator, your representative, and your parish officials. The empty chair never protected an acre of marsh. Bind It

Push for a Community Benefits Agreement in writing. Not press-release promises — enforceable commitments: local-hire percentages, funded workforce training, guaranteed public access for hunting and fishing on surrounding lands, dedicated money for coastal restoration and surge protection, and housing protections so our elders aren't taxed and priced off land their grandparents cleared. The state already set a floor by tying tax rebates to permanent jobs and capital investment. Citizens should raise that floor. Measure It Get the baseline data now. You cannot prove damage — or progress — without a starting line. Support independent monitoring of water quality, wildlife counts, fisheries, and soil stability before the first piling is driven. Our fishermen and hunters know this marsh better than any consultant ever will; pair that knowledge with real science and nobody can wave it away. Train Up Claim the jobs before somebody flies in to take them. The single most important fight is making sure Louisiana people are front and center for the high-skilled work: welding, composites, avionics, robotics, precision fabrication, logistics. We already have a marine fabrication workforce the space industry would envy. Push our community colleges and universities — SOWELA, SLCC, McNeese, UL, Fletcher — to stand up aerospace programs now. Get your kids into the STEM and trades pipelines this school year. Demand training commitments be part of every incentive dollar. Hold On Protect the land and the people on it. Learn what your property is worth before anyone makes an offer. Don't sell in a panic, and don't let your neighbor get picked off alone — landowners who organize negotiate; landowners who don't get bought. And push parish government to get ahead of the housing surge with policies that keep teachers, shrimpers, and grandparents in their own communities. Stay In Think in generations, because that's the timescale that matters. This will not transform anything overnight — and that's exactly the point. The Acadians didn't build their dikes in a season, and Titus Miller didn't build Lake Charles in a year. The people who benefit from this port will be your kids and your grandkids, but only if you take positive action now to make sure the door is open when they reach it. Plant the tree. You may not sit in its shade. They will. They exiled us once, and we turned a swamp into one of the great cultures of the Earth. Watch what we do with a spaceport.

One day a crew will sit down to eat 140 million miles from here, and on the table there will be a little bottle with a diamond label. It will say Avery Island, Louisiana. We were always going.