Sea Control - Sea Control 610: Offshore Rocket Launchers

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Tom Marotta on Linkdedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-marotta/The Spaceport Company - https://thespaceportcompany.com/The Spaceport Company on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-spaceport-company/posts/?feedView=all  

You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Shepardley. Welcome board sea control fans. This is Jay, and today our guest is Tom Marada. He's a CEO and founder of the spaceport company. We're going to talk about the use of mobile offshore platforms in the space industry. Or in case that didn't get the attention of our SIMSEC listeners, To quote from the spaceport company's website, they say, we launch rockets from ships at sea. So with that, Tom, like many of our guests, you have an eclectic background and skill set.

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this business? Yeah, thanks, Jay, for the invitation. Really glad to be here. I do have a bit of an eclectic background born and raised in New York. Study to Chinese and business at the University of Notre Dame. first job out of college was with an aerospace company, a startup in the Seattle area in your neck of the woods. And I went on to do commercial real estate and study city planning in New York City back home in New York. So I'm trained as a city planner.

At the time, the State Department was hiring city planners to do reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I served our country overseas as a diplomat with State Department for six years. Never did the reconstruction work, but did a lot of other. interesting work, so served in Europe and Africa and in Iraq, and then transferred my federal service over to the FAA. The FAA has a small office dedicated to regulating the public safety around rocket launches. So it was the FAA rocket office. Did that for five years. Got to see the rocket industry grow, the commercial rocket industry, you know, big names that everyone is aware of, SpaceX, Blue Origin, so on, Rocket Lab.

And while I was there, I noticed that the demand for launch pads exceed supply. There were lots and lots of rocket companies, but there are not lots of new rocket launch pads. After that, for about a year, I worked at a rocket company. So I transferred from the public sector to the private sector, which was a story in and of itself. but worked for about a year at a Silicon Valley, venture-funded, go-go-go-go rocket company called Astra, and watched them, help them, was part of the team that conducted three launches for them.

And that really showed me that, you know, I lived the pain of trying to find cost-effective, reliable, predictable test-range access for orbital launch. And so I started the spaceport company in 2022, Like you said, what we do, full stop is we launch rockets from ships at sea. The fancy way of saying that is we build unique infrastructure solutions for the aerospace industry. We own and operate America's only commercial launch pad ship. It's a former Navy asset.

We can talk about that. So we bought a ship from the Navy and converted it into a launch pad ship. We've operated, quote-unquote, pop-up missile test ranges in the Gulf of America and in the Atlantic Ocean. We've done 10 launches at sea. We have multiple commercial and government contracts. We're still a pretty small business. We have a small but mighty team. But we are creating a real operational capability for currently, you know, missile testing and weapons development.

And we also have marine assets available for orbital launch as well. Very cool. So much to get into here in our limited time. Where would you like to start? Where do you like to start? Exactly. I will start with since we've both been government employees there, that are a reminder that all of you is presented here are our own

and not necessarily those of any organization we might have been affiliated with in the past. So I'll just start with, I think most of our listeners know operating at sea is generally, you know, more difficult than operating from land. It seems like that that's harder than operating just from a fixed launch base. So what's the benefit of using offshore floating infrastructure? structure decommission ships for space launches. Well, launching a rocket anywhere is challenging. To be more specific, the cost to build a launch pad on land is roughly comparable to the cost

of building one on sea. Now, that said, you're absolutely right. Operating at sea is a punishing environment. I won't get into it for your listeners. They're familiar with the maintenance, whether someone and so forth. So the reason we like to operate at sea is it offers some benefits that you can't get on land. There are two general areas that constrain missile and orbital launch activities on land. One is risk, right? These are large, volatile objects that are essentially giant bombs that we purposefully light on fire. We ignite them and then fly them through the air. That is an inherently risky activity. Rockets are becoming more reliable, but they are still far, far orders of magnitude less

reliable than, say, a helicopter or carrier-based aviation or certainly far less reliable than commercial aviation. Multiple orders of magnitude. They're still extremely risky activity, even though they're getting more reliable. So that constrains your ability to operate from land. And then the second thing constraining the growth of rocket activity on land from conventional sites is that rockets are really loud. That's often said, like, there's a lot of environmental effects and there's a lot of community

opposition. That typically boils down to the fact that rockets are super loud. They're way louder than your average jet engine. And when you're only launching once every couple of months, like the space shuttle used to do or even once a week or twice a week like SpaceX is currently doing, that's fine. But we are looking at a future where many rocket operators want to launch like once an hour, if not multiple times an hour, just like commercial aviation does today. When you're operating that frequently, the blast effects, the shock waves, the sound,

will have significant environmental effects on the plants and animals close to the launch site, as well as the people living there. Sure. And so one of the, you know, people talk about the tyranny of distance at sea. Right. We call it the blessing of distance. You know, being just 30 miles offshore allows that those sound waves to dissipate and will enable a much higher rocket launch cadence in the future.

all right once spent an evening and the town several miles away but close enough to a Vandenberg space port and was awoken at night

which what we originally thought was an earthquake and folks were like no no it's just the thing that goes off regularly you're like

oh my God I can appreciate that on a personal level much less being at a ship at sea when they launch rockets you're like that's yeah

yeah and I mean it's for the folks who live in like Cape Canaveral or, you know, it's kind of neat. You know, every couple of days, oh, okay, it's sort of like a, but we're already starting to hear grumblings from the community in Cape Canaveral where they're like, oh, gosh, is this going to be like multiple times a day? Are we going to wake up the baby in the middle of the night?

Dogs are broken. And it's also an extremely, unlike Vandenberg, it's an extremely highly populated area. Right, right. There's literally the busiest cruise port in the world. world is Port Canaveral on the southern border of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, with tens of thousands of cruise passengers coming and going every week. Central Florida is one of the fastest growing regions in the nation. And so to cram more rocket activity there, not only is risky, like I said, because these rockets

below blood, I have to commend the space force. They do a great job of operating safely. but they can't do anything about the noise, right? Like there's no technology on the horizon that's feasible to reduce the noise of rocket launch is going forward. So, yeah, the future is going to remote locations and there's a lot of space out in the middle of the ocean for rocket launches for that. That kind of leads me into something I'm sure you're familiar with from your FAA time, but I'd like to get into. There's laws at sea are different. There's a complexity of laws and regulations.

and then there's also a massive lack of laws and regulations depending on high seas and international waters. Can you talk a little bit about some of the, I guess, particular challenges, opportunities, advantages on that front to doing this? Yeah, we are regulatory experts at the spaceport company. We, unlike many other spaceport operators or, you know, other folks who have operating in this area, you know, some folks are rocket experts, some folks are.

are maritime experts and some folks are regulatory experts. We are all three. We combine expertise from all these areas and we are out there operated. We, you know, my comments are informed not by theory but by actual experience, right? We are engaging with the regulators and executing these missions offshore.

So what I can tell you is that there is no free lunch. People often ask me, oh, can you just go out to international waters? and fire these rockets off without getting government authorization. The answer is a resounding no. A U.S. entity seeking to launch a rocket, especially an orbital rocket anywhere in the world, even from the middle of the most remote portions of the ocean,

still needs to get government authorization, right? Anywhere in the world. You go to a foreign country. You still need to get approval from the U.S. government to launch that rocket if you're a U.S. corporation or a U.S. person. And so there isn't that kind of libertarian fantasy of, oh, we'll just get an oil rig and go out in the middle of the ocean and fire these bumblephoth.

That does not exist. Furthermore, even though the ocean is big and there is lots of space out there, there are other users out there. And, you know, there are other ships in the sea that we want to make sure that we're deconflicting our activities from their activities. There are, you know, fishing and oil and energy extracts. and transportation. And then there's literally hundreds of planes in the air that we have to deconflict our activities with. So that requires interfacing with a lot of government

entities, both foreign and domestic, depending on how far you're flying. And then layering on top of that, insurance. I think your listeners are probably familiar. Maritime insurance is complex. It is oftentimes opaque, especially for unusual things like what we're doing. But we have also found that once you build trust with these insurers, it makes things a lot easier. So one of our competitive advantages is being able to work with the maritime insurance industry as well as the government regulators. And we've built trust with those folks to go out and repeatedly and sustainably conduct these operations in what is a very, very challenging environment.

All right. Do you see going forward, do you see the, you talked about sort of like decommissioned oil rigs, something like that. Do you see more of that? Do you see more of ships, as we might. think of them being used for this purpose or does it just depend on the payload type of rocket? Yeah, it really depends. We operate currently right now, we have three different vessel types, right? One looks kind of like a jack-up liftboat type platform. One is a very small, semi-submersible

floating platform and one is an ocean going ship, a small ocean going ship, 180 foot long former torpedo recovery vessel. So it depends on the operation. The aerospace industry and the missile and the launch industry doesn't have one rocket to rule them all. There are lots of different rockets. There are lots of different niches that we're finding. And so different customers need different types of platforms. We're also finding that while we can do certain operations on, say, our ship, there may be, it may make sense to actually do that on one of our other vessels because it's cheaper, right? Like, even though we have the ship, we've said to our customers, hey, we can do this on,

on a smaller, less complex vessel and save you some money. And so it's not often driven by the rocket and the technology as much as it is driven by the finances and the economics. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, we're definitely a for-profit company. I'll just emphasize that. You know, like I think a lot of your listeners and a lot of folks in the military environment are very focused on the technology and solving technological problems.

we have to solve technological problems, but we have to also make a profit. Sure. And so that drives us to be sometimes extremely pragmatic. And sometimes we have to step back and not accept certain jobs because we're like, this is really cool. We would love to do it. And like working with universities, we would love to work with universities, but they don't have any money.

You know, I mean, it's unfortunate that they're not funded to the point that maybe they ought to be for some of these really. exciting research projects. And we just have to kind of say, hey, you know, we, we have to, we have to turn a profit. So that forces us to be really pragmatic and really practical. And find different ways, different vessels, different areas of the ocean to, to solve the customer's problem. I guess that leads me down a whole lot of roads there. Do you, I guess in the And you're, you don't need to, I know, you're CEO of the company and I want to don't give anything to competitors. Are there other, are there other folks working in this space, as it

were? Oh, sure, sure. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, launching rockets from ships at sea is an old idea. The United States used to have this capability in the form of the Boeing, the Boeing corporation, humongous corporation, operated a converted oil rig starting in the late 1990s and up until I think 2014, launched 36 times to orbit. A large rocket, a Falcon 9-sized rocket. It was a multi-billion dollar effort, very successful. However, the reason it is not around anymore is because it was a very convoluted international partnership. And there was a lot of Russian partnerships involved in that. And so when Russia invaded Crimea the first time in 2014, that was, the, the SpaceX was kind of

stealing their market share even before 2014. And it was, it had gone through bankruptcy and come out of bankruptcy. And so it was very financially kind of shaky going up to 2014. But then because of the Russian invasion to Crimea and the Russian partnership with C-Won, it just dissolved. But despite those geopolitical and financial problems. it was a technological success. That's gone away.

The biggest operator at sea launching rockets from sea on a quasi-commercial basis, and I say quasi-commercial basis is because it's the Chinese. And it's always hard to tell in the People's Republic of China what is commercial and what is...

I think that's something our listeners will be very familiar with. I think that's an off-discussed topic of SimSec there is, yes. Well, so we're about five years behind the Chinese in terms of being able to launch satellites to orbit from the high seas. They've demonstrated at least five ocean-going barges and ships. Again, a variety of vessels capable of launching satellites to orbit from the high seas. They've done at least 19 launches from the ocean.

Many of those have been very close to shore, but they're getting further and further out. And they recently inaugurated a ship or christened a ship that has a 10,000 nautical mile range. So they can do unworn satellite launch from, you know, almost anywhere in the Pacific Ocean. And so that's, you know, the United States used to have this capability. The Chinese have leapfrog us and now we're trying to bring it back. The Europeans have been talking about sea launch since before we started the spaceport company. I haven't seen anything to that effect. And of course, SpaceX is recovering first stages, landing rockets as well as Blue Origin.

Blue Origin has landed a rocket on a barge at sea. So it's a pretty active industry, more than you might think. And that doesn't count all the military stuff, right? The military has been watching rockets out of submarines and ships for decades, right? I'm not even counted in the government. Right. I get, you talk a little bit about the Boeing's issues with going in with Russian on their lunch. Do you see going forward, I'm asking a little bit of prediction there,

that the customers for your company and this general service being more civilian, more private industry or more government or perhaps some continuing mix thereof, I guess. Yeah. So when we started the spaceport company in 2022, the commercial orbital launch industry, so think SpaceX and Rocket Lab, was much more vibrant than it is today. There was much more demand for commercial orbital launch in 2022 than there is today. At the time, Starlink was growing and there was a lot of excitement around competing satellite internet constellations. as well as remote sensing constellations. Those constellations competing to Starlink haven't really materialized yet. And furthermore, SpaceX has consolidated its hold over the launch industry. So a lot of our intended customers, small orbital launch rocket companies, they've either gone out of business or they just, they haven't, their demand hasn't materialized yet either because their customer demand, satellite companies, hasn't really

can materialize either. So the private demand went away. Happily, the government demand ramped up, or maybe I should say unhappily, conflict in Ukraine showed that the United States and the West needed new missile technology. Patriot system is outstanding, but it's really expensive. It doesn't make sense to shoot down a $50,000 drone with a $3 million missile, and we're seeing that and the shader harm. So we need cheaper interceptors. Well, if you're developing new interceptors, you need new test ranges.

And the test ranges that currently exist are full. The same demand supply and balance we saw on the commercial orbital sector. We see in the government sector as well. The wait times and the cost to operate at military test ranges is increasing. And so we created a missile test range at sea and a mobile, missile launch pad on our ships and our vessels. And so that's primarily what we do today. It's primarily government demand.

We see that demand being pretty robust for the foreseeable future. And so now let's talk about one more about private demand. I think what's old is new again. I think we might see a resurgence in commercial orbital launch. There's a lot of excitement around putting AI artificial intelligence data centers in space. So think Starlink constellations, but not to provide internet service, but to provide AI data center services. So thousands and thousands, potentially up to a million relatively small satellites, all zooming around the earth, getting solar energy from the sun for essentially for free. and then using high-capacity laser interlinks to talk to each other, move information around,

and then beaming all that back down to Earth. So there might be a day in the future where you go on to Claude or whatever, your AI service of choice, and that request is being processed by satellite in space. So everyone's familiar with the hype around AI. And it's not hype. I mean, there is serious demand. commercial demand for the consumption of AI services. I'm not talking about the production of AI services, right?

There's massive investment in new data centers. I'm talking about there is real actual demand from the industry for AI services. The same nimbism and community opposition we see around launch pad development. We're starting to see around data center development. A lot of communities don't want data centers built in their communities. so there could come a point where it's more cost-effective to actually put a portion of those data centers in orbit. If we see tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands

or maybe a million new satellites in orbit, that's going to drive the demand for more rocket launches, maybe. The same argument was made for satellite internet constellations five years ago, and we saw SpaceX just hoover up all that demand in and of itself. So maybe history will be different. this time around. I don't know, but every satellite needs a rocket. Every rocket needs a launch pad.

And the existing launch pad fleet in the United States is limited. And that's not me saying it. That's the Space Force saying it. The Space Force is saying we need, we're running out of space at Cape Cronavel. We're going to run out of space at Vandenberg. We need more space ports. And for all the reasons I mentioned earlier, the scalable bests, way to have, you know, vastly more launch pad infrastructure is to put it out at sea.

On that front, I get you talked about how some universities, that sort of thing, couldn't afford the services, didn't have this. Do you see in time, though, that that, as this is, you know, this work you're doing is possibly scalable, you have more of these, that it does open up space to, players right now, smaller countries, that kind of thing that can't, right now, can't, couldn't, couldn't work this out on their own, but perhaps through, you know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I think it's important to differentiate between universities and sovereign nations. Sovereign nations obviously have a lot more resources than even even the wealthiest universities, even the most best endowed universities. So, so I absolutely see it, yes, for sovereign nations. In fact, that's, that's all.

happening. Many European nations are seeking their own sovereign launch capabilities. Many, many nations, many nations, all around the world, are trying to find ways to not rely on, to them, foreign nations for any portion of the space-based intelligence, you know, knowledge stack, let's call it, you know, launch, launch sites, satellites, ground stations, everything that is required from a nation to have space-based intelligence and situational awareness. They want to control all of it. Well, history has shown it's extremely challenging to launch a rocket to orbit from, say, Western Europe or Israel or the UAE, three areas of the world.

world that are all seeking their own sovereign launch capability. France launches satellites to orbit from a bit of France that is actually in South America, right? They don't launch, you know, it's still technically France, but it's halfway around the world, right? Because flying over other people's countries, because of the risk issue that I mentioned earlier, airspace, deconfliction, you know, all these nations have to kind of talk about that. And it has proven to be impossible to date, very, very, very challenging to date. Even more challenges in the Middle East for a place like Israel or UAE.

So these nations are interested in sea-based launch. Like I said, Germany has been talking about sea-based launch for almost a decade now. You know, there was, I think there was some public discussion about Israel, maybe pursuing something. Italy in the 70s had an offshore launch platform off the coast of Kenya, and they're talking about restarting that. It's in complete disarranted. It's been abandoned for decades, but they're talking about, hey, we need sovereign launch. We used to have this capability down in Kenya. Let's reactivate it. So, yeah, I absolutely see sovereign nations seeking creative solutions, which, which could include sea launch.

Right. Is there, I mean, one of the general simsac discussions tends to be sort of like which particular parts of the, of the 70% of the world, it's covered by oceans is, you know, is the most important? Is, depending on what you want to do with it, is, you know, sea lines communication, this sort of thing. There's a lot of debate on what's more important where do you need to have presence, I guess. is there us to nerd out a bit here? Where do you see? Where's a good place to do this? And all that you talked about, the Gulf Mexico or Gulf of America,

if we want to say that, and then we've got some remote spots, obviously off the coast or remote for, you know, the country's launching them. So where's a good place to do this, I guess? Yeah. So there are a lot of variables that go into answering that question. If you're a rocket engineer or a satellite engineer,

you say, oh, I want to be on the equator because orbital mechanics are, or I should say, the efficiency of the rocket is increased. You can get more payload into orbit for the same amount of money, the closer you are to the equator. That's why SpaceX invested so much money in their Texas, their South Texas launch site. That's why the government put Cape Canaveral in Florida and not in, say, you know, Maine, or something like that. Okay. However, that's not the only aspect. We've talked a lot on this podcast already

about the regulatory implications. You know, there's also export control, right? These are considered weapons of war by the State Department. They're considered ICBMs, getting permission to export a commercial orbital launch vehicle to launch it from say Brazil, which is a great local right on the equator or Kenya or Southeast Asia, these places that are on the equator, which for physical reasons make a lot of sense as launch points, it's the regulatory and

legal constraints that really, you know, provide the first obstacle. Okay. So we say, all right, let's keep it in the United States. We have a spaceboard up in Alaska. Great location, very remote, not a lot of people around to bother. You know, it has this big wide open ocean, you can hit a lot of launch estimates from there. Well, now you have to layer in the logistics, right? Logistics is a big, big issue that many in the launch industry often neglect until the last minute, and they have to go figure out how to move their rocket from the factory to the launch pad. And they're like, oh, shoot, this is far more complex and expensive than I thought it would be. Alaska is a great site, but it's really, really far and it's really tough to get to.

And so, especially for commercial companies, right? The military is, you know, the best at logistics. They have to be. But they have a lot of resources to help leave things around. Commercial companies often don't. And so, you know, you do this 4D chess where you say, okay, we're trying to find the best place in the world to get to deliver our customers' satellite into orbit. But we also need someplace that, you know, allows us to have a very high cadence. So there's the regulatory aspect. We also don't want to be stuck in export control hell forever. And we need someplace where the logistics, where moving these rockets around is relatively simple. Ideally, you want your rocket factory as close to your lontepad as

possible. And vice versa. As the rockets are reusable, as they start coming back, you need to bring them back into the factory to refurbish them. You don't want to have to go all the way from Alaska to Texas, if your rocket factory is in Texas, and back again. Or, you know, South America to France and back again, right? You can do that once or twice. You can do that for a government program, for space exploration, for military stuff, but on a commercial basis when you're trying to deploy a 10,000 satellite constellation, for instance, the business case just doesn't close. You need a different solution. So the answer to your question is, we like to be as close to a big industrial port as we possibly can. So think the same type of port that is receiving international cargo,

right? We're not talking about marinas or yacht basins or things of that nature. We're talking about big ports. You have really good logistical connections, rail, highway, deep water, good vertical clearance. You know, you don't have low bridges. And then we want to be as far offshore as we possibly can. So we're not bothering the people on land, but also as close as possible to the port to reduce our fuel more than our crew. right right so so if you think about it and then and then you also want to be on a very large body of water so the majority of your rocket trajectory is is over water and not crossing over land again um so SpaceX bought the Brownsville Texas site thinking you know thinking primarily I think of physical aspects but underestimating that overflight issue right they have a very very narrow ban have to shoot the gap between Florida and Cuba to get because the rocket trajectory extends a very long distance more than the length of the Gulf.

And so they have to kind of thread that needle. And that is constraining to date. It has constrained their launch cadence out of Texas. That's why they're investing so much money in Florida. They're going back to Cape Canaveral. And they're kind of rolling the dice on potentially building a new. site in Louisiana. It's unclear if this new SpaceX property in Louisiana is for data centers, or it's for launch. They're kind of holding their cards close to their chest. But the fact is that

the Brownsville site has not given them the cadence that they wanted because of these other constraining issues beyond just the physical aspect of it. So you want to be on, you want to be on a coast that has many, many thousands of miles of ideally unconstraining overflow. So if you add that together, right, close to a port on the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean or Indian Ocean and, you know, maybe 30 to 50 miles offshore, that's hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean, right? Right. This is it. You could have hundreds of thousands of floating launch pads operating out at sea. you know, without conflict with one another.

We have 20,000 airports and airfields in the United States alone, and we only have, I think, four, well, five operational orbital launch sites. So 20,000 airports and airfields, only five places where you can launch a satellite door. You cannot have a space-faring, space superiority civilization with only five places to send a satellite to orbit. You need more. All right. That's, again, although going down the logistics whole, I think, again, for our sims sake, listeners, I think they're all about this sort of thing. This is tough folks discuss a lot and looking at

military and just general maritime stuff. So very interesting to think this all through. Lastly, I'll kind of close off with, where do you, again, to see into the future a bit, Where do you, you've talked about it. Some, where do you see this industry capability going? Are there technologies right now that we don't have that you're like, man, if someone comes up with that, or if there's a regulation that changes or any of those things? Yeah, that's a great question. Make sure if I forget to mention the technology, I think that's an important question. But before we get into the kind of the technology, the kind of the whizbang, the fun stuff, don't take my word for it, right?

Elon Musk and Gwen Shotwell, number one and number two at SpaceX, have said the future of the Starship program is offshore. This is not just Tom Arata saying it. It's far more resourced, far more experienced people in the aerospace industry, acknowledging that eventually if they want to reach the operational cadence that they seek, they know they have to go offshore. to do that with a rocket the size of the Starship, the SpaceX Starship rocket, is extremely complex and expensive.

And to their credit, they're saying, okay, let's just figure out, let's perfect the rocket. Let's get the rocket up to a level of reliability similar to what we already have with the Falcon 9, which is a much smaller rocket.

But the Falcon 9, you know, SpaceX's current rocket, is a workhorse, most reliable rocket ever built, it is the cornerstone of America's launch capability right now. If the Falcon 9 went away, we would be in a lot of trouble from a national security perspective. But it's super reliable.

Well, the next generation of SpaceX rocket, the starship is way bigger, much, much bigger. It's bigger than the moon rockets were in the 1960s, much more capable, but it's still in development. So SpaceX has said, and I'm paraphrasing, let's figure out how to get this starship rocket working. Let's perfect it. Let's get it up to the level of reliability, at least that we have with Falcon 9. And then at that point, they're going to figure out how to proliferate the launch pads around the world. And part of that proliferation solution is going to be offshore. Now, is that going to be, you know, oil rigs?

You know, a couple of years ago, SpaceX experimented with converting oil rigs. They abandoned that, that experiment. It was just a little premature. Like I said, they were still working on the rocket. Is it going to be humongous floating ships that look like big aircraft carriers? Is it going to be artificial islands? Is it, you know, going to be something else that I haven't even thought of yet? Don't know.

But they know that because the rocket is so loud and has such impacts, they're going to have to go offshore. Now, in terms of technology, there's a technology. there's a technology called point to point or it's not a technology, it's a concept, point to point rocket transport. So instead of moving cargo around the world with airplanes, so 12 hours from California to Japan, for instance, you can do it in a rocket and it would take 90 minutes.

So pretty compelling. Anybody who's done a trans-Pacific flight, even in first class, you would love to shorten that, light. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

So the market, the, the possibilities are obvious. And then for military logistics, it's also obvious. So, but like I said, rockets create a lot of blast waves. The idea of, like, landing a rocket on a beach and ejecting out a bunch of Marines and, like, cool science fiction, love the idea. But, like, when that rocket lands on that beach, it will have landed, it will have created a crater for itself. And that's it.

you've just destroyed a $100 million rocket. It won't be able to take off. But you could land a rocket on a floating platform inside of a carrier group, for instance. If you need to quickly resupply a carrier group, you could have a specialized ship going along with that carrier group. And now you have a 90-minute connection back to KONUS. Pretty compelling. Sure. Resupplying carrier groups is something in the news right now as we record.

this in August 20th of 26. Even for the folks who never don't even know what a carrier, an aircraft carrier was or, you know, don't know what logistics is. That's, that's something that catches the attention right now. So that's good. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

All right. So much. I could go on for hours, but I'll, you've got bigger, other stuff to do, man. So I will, I'll just wrap up here a little bit. Say, thanks so much. And ask where we can find you online. and any big projects that you're working on you can talk about.

Sure. Yeah. So we just completed just in the last two months, we completed two at sea rocket launch campaigns. So we worked with our customer, Crossbow, to help them mature their counter-UAS missile called Buckler. So we had multiple successful launches at sea to help them mature that system. that was back in July, so you can see the videos of that on LinkedIn.

And then last month, or no, this month, earlier this month, high flies. We did some IRAD, some internal research and development. We launched to, again, counter-UAS-scale missiles from our proprietary, floating, semi-submersible platform that we call tri-sub. This is a very interesting piece of technology. It is a floating platform that can break down and fit into a 20-foot container. It is cheap enough to be attritable.

And we have submerged launch canisters. So the missile is inside the canister, and then the canister is submerged. So it has a very low radar profile. It's only about two feet above the waterline. It has a very good draft. It's ballasted down, so it has great stability. And we think it could be a very cost-effective. attritable missile launch platform for, again, counter UAS activities in, you know, in harm's way,

in adversarial locations. So you could see both of those videos and all of that information. We have a pretty active presence on LinkedIn. We are, you just, you know, Google the spaceport company. We'll put the link up to that on the show notes here too. And then we're also, we also occasionally post on, X as well. Okay.

If you like, if you like X. Yeah. Sure. Mostly we're on, mostly we're on LinkedIn. All right. And our website,

the spaceport company.com, lots of cool videos there. You can see our ships and, and check us out. Fantastic. This was, this was fascinating. Thanks.

Thanks so much, Tom, for joining us on Tintrell. So much to think about here. So anyway, look forward to continue your discussion. Some feedback. I'd love to hear some comments and, and you know thoughts from your listeners.

All right. Fantastic. You heard it, guys. Chime in on that. So until next time, C-C-control listeners. We will turn it over to Kimbersmen. Out.