SpaceX plans to use two deepwater oil platforms as a floating offshore spaceport that the company is likely to use for the Starship rockets it is developing.
CNBC’s Michael Sheetz reports, citing public documents, that Valaris, now a bankrupt offshore platform operator, sold two platforms, 8500 and 8501, for $ 3.5 million each. The deal was completed in July last year, and Valaris – the world’s largest operator of offshore drilling platforms – filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy shortly thereafter.
The buyer of the platforms, according to the CNBC report, was a limited liability company called Lone Star Mineral Development, registered in the name of SpaceX’s chief financial officer, Bret Johnsen.
Now, the platforms have been renamed Deimos and Phobos, possibly after two moons from Mars, and have been relocated to the port of Brownsville, Texas, near where SpaceX is building its rockets.
TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington notes that SpaceX has so far tested its starship prototypes on land at a location in Boca Chica, but recalls that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company had plans to build launch sites floating in the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship is one of SpaceX’s top priorities. The huge spacecraft is planned to carry cargo and up to 100 passengers on missions to the Moon and Mars.
Elon Musk tweeted as of June 2020, SpaceX was “building super heavyweight floating spaceport for Mars, moon and hypersonic travel around Earth”. The tweet came in response to another, which said that SpaceX was hiring “a team of engineers and technicians to design and build an operational offshore rocket launch facility”.
An offshore launch site is what makes the most sense, according to reports. The spacecraft is very large and has a large explosion hazard area, NASA Space Flight Thomas Burghardt noted in a report on the oil rig news. That, together with noise concerns, he explained, would make a land launch site a poor choice, hence the decision to launch the spacecraft from an offshore location.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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