A SpaceX autonomous booster recovery barge returns from a mission.
As Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson prepared to blast into space this month, Elon Musk looked to the sea, tweeting about a largely autonomous booster-recovering ship called “A Shortfall of Gravitas.” As this latest addition to a rapidly growing SpaceX navy makes waves online, it is time to look beyond the high-tech gloss of robot recovery vessels and consider the challenges and opportunities as private space companies build navies and head out to sea.
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.
Space Navies will need security, logistical support and a host of other assistance at sea.
Pay Attention To The Space Navies
Oceangoing ships have always been an important—if underestimated—part of America’s space program. In the early stages of space exploration, ships were used in virtually every stage of NASA’s launch and recovery process. In 1965 alone, America deployed 58 separate naval vessels for astronaut recovery missions (and some of those were dispatched multiple times), while operating a separate government-owned space fleet of 21 range ships, two experimental at-sea rocket-launchers and a specialized satellite communications ship. In addition, an armada of forgotten barges and other vessels did the logistical busy-work of securing launch areas or schlepping rocket boosters along America’s inland waterways, moving boosters and rockets down the Mississippi basin and over to testing and launching facilities on the Gulf Coast.
As America’s manned space mission contracted, America’s specialized space fleet dwindled down to a few recovery tugs and transport ships like the United Launch Alliance’s recently-renamed R/S Rocket Ship and NASA’s lowly Pegasus Barge.
With SpaceX’s additions, along with Blue Origin’s future landing/recovery ship Jacklyn, America’s revitalized space navy merits more attention than it gets. It is a fascinating blend of two powerful industries, workforces and political influencing networks that, normally, fight each other for resources.
American shipbuilders, beaten down by cuts in the offshore oil and gas industry, have been slow to realize that the space industry may offer an entirely new market—and potentially a quite profitable one. Associating shipbuilding with the space industry is a great thing for shipbuilders. Right now, far too many folks entering the manufacturing workforce consider shipbuilding to be a dirty, dangerous, low-tech and low-margin pursuit. Adding glamor and a high-tech SpaceX “buzz” brings motivated workers with it. And in Washington, shipbuilding’s powerful political machinery now has a way to coordinate with aerospace initiatives for resources rather than engage in a vicious fight for funding.
The new missions force technical innovation into the maritime as well. As rocket launches and recoveries are not exactly the best places for humans to be, automation is a critical requirement, pointing the way ahead for steady, stepwise improvement in maritime autonomy. SpaceX’s autonomous barges have been quietly demonstrating the viability of autonomous maritime platforms for years, and A Shortfall of Gravitas may well be the largest fully unmanned commercial vessel in operation today.
As SpaceX prepares for the deployment of marine “spaceports,” moving as much of the final rocket assembly and booster refurbishment offshore as possible, SpaceX’s sea-borne space platforms will need additional support—crew rotation vessels, security support, autonomous tankers and a host of other auxiliaries. As SpaceX’s rockets get bigger and are launched farther away from shore, the recovery and support vessels will get bigger as well.
Naval stakeholders should take note of SpaceX’s progress. Working in relatively simple, out-and-back relays—and developing according to a defined and measurable strategy—America’s space navy could well be the real proving-grounds for future unmanned naval systems, giving hard-chargers like SpaceX an avenue to feed the U.S. Navy’s strident but halting quest for viable—and tested—autonomous operational concepts, forward basing and resupply platforms. Unlike the U.S. Navy, SpaceX knows exactly what it wants out of its maritime armada and is marching through a strategic playbook far more efficiently than the government.
Curious recreational boaters arrive near the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft in the Gulf of ... [+]
International Waters Are Gonna Get Interesting
This is no grand PowerPoint vision of the future. Maritime spaceports are already here. Later this year, once SpaceX begins to commission the first of its two floating spaceports. Not that it all hasn’t been done before—twenty years ago, in an innovative multinational effort, a company called “Sea Launch” used Russian rockets and Liberian-flagged support vessels to send thirty-two commercial payloads into orbit from favorable sites near the equator. Though Sea Launch struggled to overcome the innate inefficiencies inherent in any Russian business collaboration, the basic business model was relatively solid, and the company only collapsed after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
China is also in the space navy race, having started launching rockets at sea in 2019.
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.
The emergence of space navies will also add to the burden of America’s already overtasked Coast Guard. Keeping the public from interfering with space-related activities is hard enough, and balancing SpaceX’s desire for a public spectacle with public safety is a challenge. The friction between media hype and safety went on full display last August, when public boaters swarmed a returning Crew Dragon capsule even before the astronauts could be recovered.
Moving the whole show into more distant international waters presents even more complexity as a host of Russian trawlers, Chinese “fishing” boats and other interested observers will be even more eager to watch, interfere or just “help out” with critical autonomous operations.
With new fuels, new handling procedures and new operational expectations, a host of platform, ship and crew safety standards may need to be considered. As autonomous platforms take on increasingly complex and dangerous duties, the rules of the road as well as security concerns merit substantial Coast Guard input. And with accidents expected as part of the process, worker, crew and gear rescue and recovery contingencies need to be scrubbed, rescrubbed and scrubbed again.
Get Ready For Space Navies
Good engineering that skates the boundaries of physics, regulation and law is always a flirtation with failure. With the future of space heading to sea, it is time for all the various maritime stakeholders out there to anticipate all the operational, legal and regulatory challenges and get about fixing them. If this fundamental support work doesn’t happen now, it won’t happen later. Space navies will simply take on a life of their own. And, as space navies grow and head to sea, the race to build recovery vessels, salvage ships, security platforms, oilers and other craft will charge ahead, only to be abruptly stopped by some sort of ugly sector-defining disaster or Titanic-like catastrophe that can, with a little bit of forethought now, be avoided in the exciting years to come.
