RCoast, a New Orleans climate tech startup founded by former NASA scientist Christy Swann, is using drones to gather the data coastal restoration crews need to work along the Gulf and beyond. The company’s work is showing up in a string of Louisiana images that place climate science, recycling and reef building in the same frame.
Swann said she has always loved beaches and collecting data, a line that fits the company she built around both. On Wednesday, August 14, 2024, workers lowered one of 500 3D printed concrete modules from a barge into Gulf water in Grand Isle, Louisiana, to help build a reef. In January 2026, RCoast geospatial data analyst Dallon Weathers stood on new land being built in Quarantine Bay, Louisiana, another sign of how the region is trying to hold on to ground that is steadily changing.
The broader effort matters because South Louisiana remains one of the places where the effects of erosion, flooding and land loss are felt most sharply, and the region’s restoration work often doubles as a test case for tools that could be used elsewhere. That is where a startup like RCoast fits in: it is not just collecting images from the air, but trying to turn them into usable information for coastal projects that depend on exact measurements, changing terrain and fast decisions.
The pictures tied to the project also point to how many pieces now sit inside the same restoration story. On Tuesday, July 8, 2025, Max Steitz stood on a giant pile of glass waiting to be recycled at the Glass Half Full facility on Paris Road in St. Bernard Parish, while Franziska Trautmann knelt by a pile of glass that had already been recycled into sand behind the same facility. The glass operation is separate from RCoast, but it sits in the same network of South Louisiana efforts trying to turn waste, water and shoreline damage into something that can be managed.
That is the friction in the story: the work is moving, but slowly, and it is happening in places where the land itself keeps shifting under the people doing it. New Orleans is part of the center of that ecosystem, even if the city is not the focus of every project, and the question now is not whether restoration will continue, but whether tools like drones, recycled materials and artificial reef-building can scale fast enough to matter before more coast disappears.
