Elon Musk And Other Space Players Are Building Up Navies As They Take Rocketry To Seahttps://www.forbes.com/sites/craighooper/2021/07/20/challenges-and-opportunities-as-space-companies-build-navies/SpaceX is already a big maritime player, fielding a diverse, high-tech set of eight contracted vessels and two oil-rig platforms. A simple tug handles day-to-day barge-hauling duties, three ships handle payload fairing and Dragon capsule recovery work, while another helps with booster landings. Three autonomous barge-like craft, or self-propelled “drone vessels,” serve as booster landing platforms, while two oil rigs, or Starship “floating spaceports,” are under construction. In essence, this fleet is a foundation for moving SpaceX offshore, helping to push as much rocketry as possible out to sea.
Elon Musk’s modern take on Robert Truax’s massive “Sea Dragon,” a 60’s-era concept for a giant re-usable sea-launched booster, is coming together. If the concept actually “takes off,” the opportunities for America’s shipbuilding community are fascinating. As SpaceX and other emerging space companies head out to sea, launching bigger and bigger rockets, they will need everything from barges to tugs to tankers. The demand signal may do a lot to enliven America’s gritty industrial waterfront, a politically powerful but moribund manufacturing sector that collapsed with global oil prices. But as space goes offshore, offering economic benefits at home, maritime space launching ventures will also be tempted to fully exploit the legal “grey zones” in international waters, adding complexity to increasingly busy and increasingly coveted swathes of water—where norms, operational practices and laws haven't kept up with technological advances.
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Nobody really knows exactly what Elon Musk has in mind for his two floating spaceports. But we can guess. With fewer people at sea, fewer regulatory hassles and the ability to launch from anywhere, a sea-launch solution offers companies a big competitive edge. And once SpaceX has figured out how to launch and operate from the sea, the company can scale up and start trying to launch payloads from the equator, where the greater rotational speed of the Earth makes it easier for rockets to get into orbit, or, instead, marine launchers can tailor launch locations to meet the technical needs of various customers or those more challenging energy—dense payloads needed for planetary work.
There are a lot of potential benefits from going to sea. But the most immediate benefit for Elon Musk is that launching from international waters puts SpaceX beyond the reach of pesky U.S. regulators. Elon has made no secret that he has little time to waste on government compliance. By fielding floating spaceports, and then sending those spaceports out to international waters, a lot of potentially irksome and time-wasting regulatory problems disappear. And if parts of SpaceX’s navy starts operating under flags of convenience, everything from U.S. taxes, basic American labor standards, worker safety and environmental compliance requirements can, by and large, just go away.
Take, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration. A longstanding feud between SpaceX and the FAA has been widely reported, and it is showing no signs of cooling off. In Texas, SpaceX and the FAA have jostled over everything from Starship testing to road closures, and the two parties are currently in a standoff over a launch tower that the FAA says is unapproved. It has to be irritating, knowing that, just twelve miles out to sea from the SpaceX “company town” of Boca Chica, Texas, the FAA suddenly has very little sway over what SpaceX does.