‘Star Wars’ Goes to Sea : Air Force Considers Using Offshore Oil Rigs to Launch Rockets

The Air Force, spooked by Indian ghosts and other random forces, is studying whether it can launch “Star Wars” rockets from a massive oil-drilling rig a few miles off the California coast instead of building a new launch complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Air Force officials say that numerous onshore obstacles--ranging from the high cost of shooting rockets to the existence of sacred Chumash Indian burial sites at Vandenberg--might drive them into the ocean to launch the next generation of spacecraft.

“Quite frankly, by going offshore you can avoid a lot of this stuff,” said a spokesman for the Air Force space division at El Segundo, where conceptual studies for a new family of rockets for the 1990s are under way.

In the end, of course, Uncle Sam will fire his rockets from wherever he wants. And the oil rig scheme is the sort of goofy-sounding military idea that prominent space critic John Pike likes to joke about. But he says it isn’t so far-fetched.

“There is a certain giggle factor associated with it,” said Pike, associate director for space policy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. “On the other hand, why not?”

Among the ideas under review is using the world’s largest type of offshore oil-drilling platform, known in the business as the “Gorilla,” a mobile contraption so big that it could accommodate two football games at the same time.

Embryo Stage

As depicted in artists’ sketches, tugboats could tow the platform into the Vandenberg harbor where the rig’s giant forklifts would reach out, pick up a 5-million-pound rocket and stand it upright on the deck where the drilling derrick usually goes.

The tugs would then tow this affair out a few miles--beyond the three-mile purview of the California Coastal Commission, say--where the rig would “jack down” its steel legs to the ocean floor. The rocket would then be ready for fueling and launch, fired by remote control from Vandenberg.

According to Capt. David Blehm of the Air Force Space and Missile Test Organization, it is one of several offshore launch scenarios under study as the Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration wind up conceptual studies for a proposed new advanced launch system, or ALS.

“SAMTO is interested in pursuing the offshore concept, and this is one method,” said Blehm, one of the Vandenberg officers who have been touring offshore oil rigs and the designated, if reluctant, spokesman on the subject. “We’re in the embryo stage.”

Other ideas, said Blehm, include launching spacecraft from a remote Pacific isle, a ship or a man-made island or even using one of the Channel Islands--now a little-used but wildlife-rich national park--as an occasional launch site.

“They’re thinking very broadly,” said Richard Huling, civilian spokesman for the space division.

This might amount to some posthumous revenge for the Chumash, once 15,000 strong in the central coastal area of California, whose heritage all but vanished with the encroachment of Anglo and Mexican cultures. Descendants have lately been trying to protect their grave sites from desecration.

Up to 50 Launches a Year

Federal agencies are required to record and protect any significant archeological resources that turn up during construction projects. It is a complicated and sometimes emotion-charged process, said Larry Spanne, a civilian archeologist retained by Vandenberg’s environmental office. The Air Force tries to plan its work around such sites.

Such restraints, when combined with the massive areas required by the complex of buildings and other elements that make up a launch facility, prompt Air Force officials to complain that they are “running out of real estate” at Vandenberg.

The impetus for all this is the expected heavy schedule of launches for the proposed advance launch system, a new generation of unmanned space vehicles that the Air Force hopes will “do for space transportation what the DC-3 did for air transportation over 50 years ago.”

The program envisions up to 50 launches a year, beginning in 1996, at one-tenth the per-pound payload cost of today’s space program. The rockets themselves have been dubbed “space trucks.”

Analyst Pike says that only the Strategic Defense Initiative program, or Star Wars, would need that kind of launch vehicle, although the Air Force says the planned space station is also “a potential major user” of ALS vehicles.

One way to slash costs is on the launch pad itself. One recently built at Vandenberg for the space shuttle--and never used--cost $3.3 billion. An offshore oil rig could supposedly be custom-built for $100 million, proponents say, and be connected by cable to Vandenberg’s existing launch command facilities and telemetry.

Whatever the role of money, burial sites and other facts of life, Pike says a move offshore ultimately depends on the fate of the Star Wars program and, if it survives past the Reagan presidency, on the question of whether its orbiting hardware requires a polar or equatorial orbit.

Because of a prohibition against “flying over someone’s 7-Eleven,” in Pike’s words, Cape Canaveral--the other major U.S. launch site--launches satellites only east over the Atlantic and into an equatorial orbit. Vandenberg launches only to the south, so the debris lands in the Pacific and the satellite enters polar orbit. Only Vandenberg has a real estate problem.

Still Some Obstacles

“If it’s Vandenberg, an offshore launch will get serious consideration,” Pike said. “All that other rationale is secondary. If they need to do it, they’re gonna do it.”

Of course, if there are onshore obstacles, there are offshore obstacles. The sonic boom alone could distress marine wildlife, one state official said, and fueling the rockets at sea means the transfer of explosive and hazardous substances. Such issues remain to be explored.

Conceded Blehm: “There are trade-offs.”

Mark Delaplaine, of the coastal commission’s energy division, said the commission would examine spillover effects of any such project on state waters. But he noted that the type of mobile rig under study is “like a boat in the ocean” and might be less objectionable than a permanent platform that is producing oil.

“At least we wouldn’t have to worry about oil spills,” Delaplaine joked. Politically speaking, he added: “We’re not going to stop a Defense program that’s been determined to be in the interests of national security.

The only others to launch rockets from oil platforms are the Italians. Aided by NASA and on a smaller scale, they have orbited satellites several times from a small converted oil platform in shallow water off the coast of Kenya.

Seaworthy Vessels

Understandably, one proponent of offshore platforms is R. A. Keller, executive vice president of Rowan Cos. of Houston, whose Gorilla rig is apparently a top candidate for the Air Force project. It is a jack-up rig--one whose legs can be raised so the whole affair floats, or extended down until it stands on the ocean floor.

If Beatrice Lillie were to board a Gorilla, she might ask, as she did on her first trip aboard an ocean liner, “When does this place arrive?” The five Gorillas operating today--in the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Nova Scotia--are the biggest rigs ever built.

They don’t have swimming pools or movie theaters, but they do boast living quarters for 86 crew members and a six-bed hospital. They drill oil wells and then move on, replaced by permanent production platforms. The existing Gorillas are approved seaworthy vessels and have been towed all over the world by oceangoing tugs.

Keller said his company was approached by Air Force officials last year. He said a Gorilla could handle any rocket on the drawing boards.

“At first we thought it was a pretty far out idea, fun to fool with, but nothing to take too seriously,” Keller said. “But looking at our rig was kind of enlightening to them.”