Long Beach Venture Plans to Launch Satellites at Sea : Space: Boeing-led group would send up rockets from movable platform. A $1-billion Hughes order is expected.
A Boeing Co.-led consortium today is expected to unveil a unique plan for launching satellite-carrying rockets from a floating platform in the Pacific, with Hughes Electronics Corp. agreeing to be its first customer with a $1-billion order.
The consortium--called Sea Launch--also will announce its intention to base the platform at the Port of Long Beach, a move that would create about 400 jobs and give the port a much-needed boost in the aftermath of the Pentagon’s decision to close the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, people familiar with the deal said.
For Hughes, officials said the seaborne launch facility would add a much-needed extra launch site, helping it to keep pace with a growing backlog of satellite orders that will also mean 1,000 new jobs at its satellite-manufacturing operation in El Segundo in 1996.
Sea Launch--whose other members are firms from Russia, Ukraine and Norway--would become the first major provider of launching services that would not be based on land. Its major rivals are McDonnell Douglas Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp., Europe’s Arianespace and China’s Long March group.
Sea Launch plans to convert a 31,000-ton oil drilling platform into a floating launch pad that would stretch the length of 1 1/2 football fields. It would be self-propelled but also could be towed by a 650-foot ship that would carry the rockets and serve as the launch pad’s command center.
According to Sea Launch executives, the platform typically would be towed thousands of miles out into the Pacific so that the rockets could be launched from off Kiribati, a small island nation on the equator formerly known as the Gilbert Islands.
Equatorial launches are considered among the most efficient for placing satellites in orbit. Indeed, Arianespace’s launch center is near the equator in Kourou, French Guiana, in South America. But Sea Launch asserted that its floating platform would provide worldwide launch sites for all types of satellites.
“We can go to any orbit. . . . We are not fixed by a land base,” said Pat Enyeart, vice president for business management at Boeing’s Commercial Space Co. unit.
Other primary launch sites include Cape Canaveral in Florida and sites in China and Russia.
Rick Hauck, chief executive of International Technology Underwriters, a Bethesda, Md.-based insurer of launches, said Sea Launch’s prospects as a long-term player in the industry appear strong because “if you’ve got Boeing and Hughes involved, that says a lot as to what they think the viability of this is.”
Hughes, the world’s biggest producer of commercial satellites and a Los Angeles-based unit of General Motors Corp., signed up for at least 10 launches aboard Sea Launch.
The company embraced Sea Launch “because we’re concerned about having adequate launch capacity for the satellites we’re building,” said Steven D. Dorfman, president of Hughes’ Telecommunications & Space Co. group. Hughes’ order backlog has bulged to 41 satellites valued at $6 billion because of 27 new orders this year alone.
In a related step to ensure adequate rocket supplies, Hughes in May placed a $1-billion launch order to help pay for McDonnell Douglas’ development of a new model of its Delta rocket, the Delta III.
As is typical, Hughes will get a discount from Sea Launch’s normal prices because it’s the first customer. But the Sea Launch venture also appealed to Hughes because its Long Beach headquarters would be only a few miles from El Segundo, Dorfman said.
“We don’t have to go to South America, China, Russia or even to Florida” to launch satellites, he said. “We can just go down the street to Long Beach Harbor.”
Long Beach, in turn, appeals to Sea Launch because Hughes’ El Segundo plant is so close. “The proximity of our largest customer to the processing facility makes for a good scenario,” Enyeart said.
For the Sea Launch platform to operate from Long Beach, the consortium must negotiate lease arrangements with the city’s port commission. The agency, in turn, needs certain approvals from the Navy to develop the site commercially.
Carl Russell, senior economic development officer at the Long Beach Business Development Center, said Sea Launch’s plans are “exciting because this is a corporate presence that could be critical” to long-term commercial growth at the port.
The notion of launching rockets at sea has been kicking around for three decades. In 1988, for example, the Air Force considered launching rockets from converted oil drilling rigs a few miles off the California coast near Vandenberg Air Force Base.
At the same time, Boeing had been looking for ways to enter the launch business, Enyeart said. But it was only recently that Boeing and its partners figured that the development costs of launching at sea--about $500 million--were affordable enough and that demand for satellite launchers was high enough to make the venture profitable, he said.
