The dream of offshore rocket launches is finally blasting off | Hacker News Reader

The dream of offshore rocket launches is finally blasting off

technologyreview.com

65 pointspseudolus37 comments

There was also appropriately named Sea Launch company, an joint enterprise between 4 countries that made 30+ launches between 1999 and 2014 from a repurposed oil platform - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch

There’s also Copenhagen Suborbitals, which seems to be still going despite their cofounder being Peter Madsen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Suborbitals

I Googled Peter Madsen, figuring he did some securities fraud or whatnot, but wow, no, full-on submarine murder.

There must be something intrinsically pathological about the rocket business, talking back to V2/NASA origins. Are there any non evil individuals in there?

You can look back to the original Futurist manifesto which took the glorification of power through technology and turned it into the original Fascist movement.

Find-replace electricity with AI in a Marinetti speech [1] and you basically have an Andreessen Horowitz press release.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Tommaso_Marinetti#Futu...

I challenge you to find anything bad to say about Maxime Faget, one of the finest spaceflight engineers there ever was.

You've gotta be trolling.

Sea Launch was born dead, because huge share own by Russians (in reality, Russian gov), and they are inexperienced on market economy.

Final end of company become, when Russians pushed Boeing to quit company and after that transaction, non-Russian co-owners become minority.

So, even at best times, of company, even with best technical side, their marketing and business strategy suffer from owners so much, that this killed company.

Sea Launch is covered in the Technology Review article.

There's a photo of the V2 launching from USS Midway on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_Sandy_and_Pushover

The number of people on the flight deck at the time of launch is scary.

Definitely - this launch is mentioned in the article:

"As it turned out, the inaugural flight was a bit of a mixed bag. Neal Casey, an 18-year-old technician stationed on the Midway, later recalled how the missile tilted dangerously starboard and headed toward the vessel’s own command center, known as the island.

"“I had no problem tracking the rocket,” said Casey, according to the USS Midway Museum. “It almost hit the island.”"

This scene showing a Sea Dragon launch at the end of the first season of For all mankind is something special:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6YJ5oIcT4g

https://www.unionvfx.com/work/for-all-mankind/

> SpaceX eventually abandoned this project and sold the rigs, though Gwynne Shotwell, its president and COO, said in 2023 that sea-based launches were likely to be part of the company’s future. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

Is anything known why they stopped pursuing the offshore space port idea? I assume SpaceX found some significant drawbacks that weren't obvious when they bought the oil rigs just a few years ago.

News from the time the rigs were sold were relatively clear https://spacenews.com/spacex-drops-plans-to-covert-oil-rigs-...

Shotwell said "They were not the right platform" and that they needed "to first start launching Starship and better understand that vehicle before building offshore launch platforms".

The stated goal of Starship is that the booster can be refueled and relaunched from the recovery tower within hours. So "launch platform" is a misnomer, these guys are ideally also recovery platforms (with the chopsticks and all that). In addition, even if an offshore platform could work for booster recovery, it still needs a Starship to be stacked. There's probably a bunch of concern about having a Starship sitting around in the open near a booster recovery (the exact effect of blast/debris around a booster recovery is probably one thing they'd want to characterize).

Texas is just a much better and cheaper option. It retains the upsides of sea launches (being able to select location, being far from people) without the downsides (being out in the water vs landlocked). They can also take advantage of US infrastructure and legal stability, which are downsides noted in the article about equatorial locations, while retaining the upsides of those areas in the form of not needing to worry about pollution, and very malleable state laws. Basically Texas is as good as it gets if you’re amoral and running a company with large externalities.

I think Texas is currently used for testing purposes while the main Starship launch site will be in Kennedy Space Center, Florida. It's currently being built.

Still, that's not a new fact, so there must have been a reason why they first thought offshore space ports were a valuable addition and then later changed their mind.

One upside of sea launches is the ability to choose any heading, which makes reaching the desired orbit easier. When launching from land, you have a limited range of possible headings, unless you are willing to launch over populated areas.

For example, rockets launched from Florida to ISS initially head northeast. A similar launch from Boca Chica would place the trajectory uncomfortably close to Houston.

For ships, stability seems to be the main problem: https://x.com/BrentM_SpaceX/status/1885450296421208118 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1885508628582474040

Not sure about oil rigs

Semi-submersibles--which is what Sea Launch was (former Ocean Odyssey)--are pretty stable. The marine risers (i.e. the big pipes that connect to the subsea blowout preventer) don't tolerate a lot of angle. Source: Used to work on, among other things, offshore drilling rig mooring analysis.

But I can imagine all sorts of reasons why using an offshore platform introduces a bunch of challenges that launching from land doesn't have. Though of course, the ability to get away from people is a plus too.

One of my wife's relatives was the master for the sea trials for one of the ships involved in Sea Launch. He had an incredible career, starting off as a brass helmet diver for the Royal Navy and ending up with Sea Launch.

That's why SL used most sophisticated rocket of time - Zenit, which was by definition extremely tolerant to platform instability (most other space rockets was not so tolerant).

Despite Musk's whining about the FAA, SpaceX is not facing any difficulties getting its rockets launched from land, so there's no reason, at this point, to add something else with the potential to slow things down.

It did not even want to build a proper launchpad at Boca Chica, which did not work out so well.

It worked out fine. It's an example of iterative design where you find out the problems of an approach by doing the experiment, rather than by analysis, where you find out and have to address all the nonexistent imaginary problems too.

Except we'd already done a lot of experiments and you don't have to test it at full scale to realise it's gonna be chaos.

Yes, there's some interesting papers post-fact on the ejecta but it was still dumb.

My understanding is that it was a matter of timeline. They simply did not want to wait and we're willing to trade off the consequences.

SpaceX was already shipping a fabricated deluge system to Starbase 3 months before the first flight tore up the LaunchPad [1]. At the end of the day, the rocket did get off the pad. The repair was completed and the ready waiting deluge system installed in less than 3 months.

This aspect is always lost in the bluster from Musk, and claims of incompetence from critics.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starbase-starship-deluge-sy...

The alternative view is they got off really really lightly for wrecking wetland and sandblasting the neighbourhood.

The reason the deluge system was installed so quickly is exactly the reason you can't argue that 'they wanted to see if they could do without'. They knew a priori that it was necessary, that's why they'd basically already staged the hardware.

Installing a deluge system pre-launch would have cost them a month, a month that they wouldn't have spent afterwards, waiting for another round of sign-offs.

It was a dumb decision and posting fan-blogs like Teslarati isn't a good argument.

The blog was refenced for time stamped evidence of what I presented. The fan nature of it shouldn't matter unless you think the pictures are fabricated.

That said, I think you are right. Most of it comes down to how much someone cares about debris in the wetland and dust clouds.

Back then I doubt even Musk thought he was going to become CEO of USofA. If he had known that, I doubt he'd ever have been concerned about having any restrictions from any gov't agency. Now, he's pretty much bulldozed a clear path for SpaceX doing whatever it wants. That definitely makes the need for an expensive ocean platform totally unnecessary.

They're trying to make their little slice of land into an actual city. Next stop, carve out that land to become a separate state. Then he can just become governor since he can't be president without having a co- prefix.

> he's pretty much bulldozed a clear path for SpaceX doing whatever it wants

SpaceX is waiting for Starship launch authorisation from the FAA.

I'm sorry, has Musk completed his takeover of the gov't or is he still working?

> has Musk completed his takeover of the gov't or is he still working?

"Pretty much bulldozed a clear path for SpaceX doing whatever it wants" implies the former.

There will be a Democratic administration in 4 or 8 years, and they'll want to settle scores.

https://archive.is/FmOqg

Thank you, after clicking the third(!!) X button i had enough.

the title is clickbait - offshore rocket launch is 8 decades old and the article knows it.

the article is a lightweight survey of some anecdotes from this long history.

ends with a vaporware pitch for a franchise business.

this is nothing

the technology review is garbage.

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