WASHINGTON — Two firms have demonstrated the power to conduct launches from a floating platform in U.S. territorial waters, an idea that would help address congestion at terrestrial launch sites.
The Spaceport Company announced May 23 it hosted 4 sounding rocket launches by Evolution Space on May 22 from a platform within the Gulf of Mexico. The launches were a part of a proof-of-concept test of the power to conduct launches from an offshore platform.
“This demonstration provided quite a few lessons which shall be incorporated into our next project: constructing a sea-based spaceport able to orbital operations,” Tom Marotta, chief executive and founding father of The Spaceport Company, said in a press release.
The launches, the corporate said, were intended to exercise the procedures needed to conduct an orbital launch from such a platform. That included getting approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Coast Guard, clearing airspace and waters to permit for a protected launch and remotely launching the rocket.
The businesses didn’t disclose the particular location of the launches. The FAA did have airspace closures in place May 22 for “space operations” in a small area of the Gulf of Mexico just south of Gulfport, Mississippi, an area where such airspace closures typically don’t happen.
The launches themselves were by Evolution Space, a Mojave, California-based company working on solid-propellant launch vehicles for defense and space applications. The corporate conducted its first launch that passed the 100-kilometer Kármán Line April 22 from the California desert, reaching a peak altitude of 124.5 kilometers.
“We’re proud and grateful to be involved in what The Spaceport Company is doing,” Steve Heller, chief executive and founding father of Evolution Space, said in an organization statement.
The Spaceport Company plans to develop floating launch platforms based on a ship design called a liftboat. The platform can sail to a designed location after which extend legs to anchor itself to the seafloor and lift the platform out of the water.
The launch platforms wouldn’t require any land-based infrastructure and can be easier to develop and operate than traditional launch sites on land. That features facilities like Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and the neighboring Kennedy Space Center, which have seen growing launch activity that’s straining the range’s infrastructure.
“It’s loads easier to construct more ships to fulfill more launch demand than it’s to go find 100 acres on the coast somewhere,” Marotta said at a conference in February.
Those platforms would have the ability to accommodate small launch vehicles with payload capacities of as much as about one ton to low Earth orbit. Marotta said in February the corporate was working on a funding round to support work on those platforms that he said can be helped by each the demonstration launches and partnerships with launch providers. The corporate announced in April a partnership with Vaya Space, a small launch vehicle developer previously often called Rocket Crafters, to host launches of that company’s vehicles as soon as 2025.
Floating launch platforms have been used on a bigger scale, notably by the previous multinational Sea Launch enterprise, which launched Zenit-3SL rockets from a converted oil rig on the Equator within the Pacific Ocean. SpaceX has also considered using offshore platforms for its Starship vehicle, but the corporate said in February it was scrapping two oil rigs it had planned to convert into launch pads after concluding they weren’t the best platforms.
