SpaceX plans to use two deepwater oil rigs as floating offshore space ports that the company will likely use for the Starship missiles it is developing.
CNBC’s Michael Sheetz reports, citing public documents, that the now-bankrupt offshore platform operator Valaris has sold two platforms, 8,500 and 8,501, for $ 3.5 million each. The deal was finalized in July last year, and Valaris – the world’s largest drilling rig operator – has called for short-term bankruptcy protection for Chapter 11.
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 two months after Mars, and have been relocated to Brownsville Harbor in Texas, near where SpaceX is building its Starship rockets.
TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington notes that SpaceX has so far tested its Starship prototypes on land at a Boca Chica site, but recalls that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company intends to build floating launch sites. in the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship is a top priority for SpaceX. The next spacecraft is planned to carry cargo and up to 100 passengers on missions to the Moon and Mars.
Elon Musk posted on Twitter in June 2020, SpaceX “builds super-heavy, floating spaceports for Mars, the moon, and hypersonic travel around the Earth.” The tweet came in response to another, who said that SpaceX is hiring “a team of engineers and technicians to design and build an operational facility for launching offshore missiles.”
An offshore launch site is the one that makes the most sense, according to reports. The Starship spacecraft is very large and has a large area of danger of explosion, said Thomas Burghardt of NASA Space Flight in a report on the news of the oil platform. This, along with noise concerns, he explained, would make a launch site on land a bad choice, hence the decision to launch the spacecraft from the foot from an offshore location.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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