[HN Gopher] The dream of offshore rocket launches is finally bla...
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The dream of offshore rocket launches is finally blasting off
Author : pseudolus
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-02-12 15:21 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
| rwmj wrote:
| There's a photo of the V2 launching from USS Midway on Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_Sandy_and_Pushover
| pintxo wrote:
| The number of people on the flight deck at the time of launch
| is scary.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.""
| ricardobeat wrote:
| https://archive.is/FmOqg
| luca4 wrote:
| Thank you, after clicking the third(!!) X button i had enough.
| eps wrote:
| 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
| robin_reala wrote:
| There's also Copenhagen Suborbitals, which seems to be still
| going despite their cofounder being Peter Madsen.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Suborbitals
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| There must be something intrinsically pathological about the
| rocket business, talking back to V2/NASA origins. Are there
| any non evil individuals in there?
| huhtenberg wrote:
| You've gotta be trolling.
| relaxing wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| 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_Marinet
| ti#Futu...
| lupusreal wrote:
| I challenge you to find anything bad to say about Maxime
| Faget, one of the finest spaceflight engineers there ever
| was.
| stavros wrote:
| I Googled Peter Madsen, figuring he did some securities fraud
| or whatnot, but wow, no, full-on submarine murder.
| cubefox wrote:
| Sea Launch is covered in the Technology Review article.
| simne wrote:
| 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.
| lysace wrote:
| 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/
| cubefox wrote:
| > 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.
| a12k wrote:
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| 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.
| pr337h4m wrote:
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 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.
| simne wrote:
| 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).
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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...
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _he 's pretty much bulldozed a clear path for SpaceX
| doing whatever it wants_
|
| SpaceX is waiting for Starship launch authorisation from
| the FAA.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm sorry, has Musk completed his takeover of the gov't
| or is he still working?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There will be a Democratic administration in 4 or 8 years,
| and they'll want to settle scores.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| 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).
| vpribish wrote:
| 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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