SpaceX plans to use two deepwater oil rigs as marine floating space ports that the company will likely use for the Starship rockets it is developing.
CNBC’s Michael Sheetz reports, citing public documents, that the current bankrupt marine platform operator, Valaris, 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 rigs – applied for Chapter 11 banking protection shortly afterwards.
According to the CNBC report, the buyer of the platforms was a limited liability company called Lone Star Mineral Development, registered in the name of SpaceX chief financial officer Bret Johnsen.
Now, the platforms have changed their name to Deimos and Phobos, possibly after two moons of Mars, and have moved to the port of Brownsville, Texas, near where SpaceX is building its Starship rockets.
TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington notes that SpaceX has so far been testing its Starship prototypes at a Boca Chica site, but recalls that Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, had said the company had plans to build floating launch sites. in the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship is one of SpaceX’s top priorities. The huge spacecraft is scheduled to carry cargo and up to 100 passengers on missions to the Moon and Mars.
Elon Musk he tweeted by June 2020, SpaceX was “building super-heavy-class floating space ports for Mars, moon, and hypersonic travel around Earth.” The tweet responded to another, which said SpaceX was hiring “a team of engineers and technicians to design and build an offshore rocket launcher operating facility.”
According to reports, a launch site on the high seas makes the most sense. The Starship spacecraft is very large and has a large area of danger of explosion, noted Thomas Burghardt of NASA’s space flight in a report on the news of the oil rig. This, coupled with noise problems, he explained, would make a launch site ashore a bad choice, hence the decision to launch a state-of-the-art spacecraft from an offshore location.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
More highlights from Oilprice.com: