You are talking about Sea Launch, a subsidiary of Boeing (I think). They repurposed an old oil rig to launch rockets from the equator and had a cruise ship to take rockets and crew to the launch site and back to mainland.
The issue was the logistics of getting everything/everyone out to the oil rig. It isn’t enough to just launch from the equator; you also have to launch far away enough from land that any mishaps won’t rain debris all over people. So you have to put that floating pad REALLY far away from land (plus however far your host country is from the equator). Additionally, rockets require a bunch of consumables to even get ready to fly. Liquid Helium, Nitrogen, Oxygen, fuel, etc. Those have to be shipped out to replenish them, and they can’t be easily replenished if you have too many launch scrubs. Plus the cost of paying/feeding the crew being on a cruise ship for weeks on end.
It says something interesting about the economics if, even with the massive penalty of the exponential rocket equation, just paying more crew and shipping more stuff by boat comes out as not worth it.
So what ever happened to floating launchpads? Did they really work that poorly?
It can work for landing pads.
But for launching?
Seas tend to… not be placid.
Rocket fuel tends to do ‘funny’ things when you repeatedly oscilate it and shake it about.
You are talking about Sea Launch, a subsidiary of Boeing (I think). They repurposed an old oil rig to launch rockets from the equator and had a cruise ship to take rockets and crew to the launch site and back to mainland.
The issue was the logistics of getting everything/everyone out to the oil rig. It isn’t enough to just launch from the equator; you also have to launch far away enough from land that any mishaps won’t rain debris all over people. So you have to put that floating pad REALLY far away from land (plus however far your host country is from the equator). Additionally, rockets require a bunch of consumables to even get ready to fly. Liquid Helium, Nitrogen, Oxygen, fuel, etc. Those have to be shipped out to replenish them, and they can’t be easily replenished if you have too many launch scrubs. Plus the cost of paying/feeding the crew being on a cruise ship for weeks on end.
It says something interesting about the economics if, even with the massive penalty of the exponential rocket equation, just paying more crew and shipping more stuff by boat comes out as not worth it.