International Waters Are Gonna Get Interesting This is no grand PowerPoint vision of the future. Maritime spaceports are already here. Later this year, once SpaceX begins to commission the first of its two floating spaceports. Not that it all hasn’t been done before—twenty years ago, in an innovative multinational effort, a company called “Sea Launch” used Russian rockets and Liberian-flagged support vessels to send thirty-two commercial payloads into orbit from favorable sites near the equator. Though Sea Launch struggled to overcome the innate inefficiencies inherent in any Russian business collaboration, the basic business model was relatively solid, and the company only collapsed after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. China is also in the space navy race, having started launching rockets at sea in 2019. Nobody really knows exactly what Elon Musk has in mind for his two floating spaceports. But we can guess. With fewer people at sea, fewer regulatory hassles and the ability to launch from anywhere, a sea-launch solution offers companies a big competitive edge. And once SpaceX has figured out how to launch and operate from the sea, the company can scale up and start trying to launch payloads from the equator, where the greater rotational speed of the Earth makes it easier for rockets to get into orbit, or, instead, marine launchers can tailor launch locations to meet the technical needs of various customers or those more challenging energy—dense payloads needed for planetary work. There are a lot of potential benefits from going to sea. But the most immediate benefit for Elon Musk is that launching from international waters puts SpaceX beyond the reach of pesky U.S. regulators. Elon has made no secret that he has little time to waste on government compliance. By fielding floating spaceports, and then sending those spaceports out to international waters, a lot of potentially irksome and time-wasting regulatory problems disappear. And if parts of SpaceX’s navy starts operating under flags of convenience, everything from U.S. taxes, basic American labor standards, worker safety and environmental compliance requirements can, by and large, just go away. Take, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration. A longstanding feud between SpaceX and the FAA has been widely reported, and it is showing no signs of cooling off. In Texas, SpaceX and the FAA have jostled over everything from Starship testing to road closures, and the two parties are currently in a standoff over a launch tower that the FAA says is unapproved. It has to be irritating, knowing that, just twelve miles out to sea from the SpaceX “company town” of Boca Chica, Texas, the FAA suddenly has very little sway over what SpaceX does. The emergence of space navies will also add to the burden of America’s already overtasked Coast Guard. Keeping the public from interfering with space-related activities is hard enough, and balancing SpaceX’s desire for a public spectacle with public safety is a challenge. The friction between media hype and safety went on full display last August, when public boaters swarmed a returning Crew Dragon capsule even before the astronauts could be recovered. Moving the whole show into more distant international waters presents even more complexity as a host of Russian trawlers, Chinese “fishing” boats and other interested observers will be even more eager to watch, interfere or just “help out” with critical autonomous operations. With new fuels, new handling procedures and new operational expectations, a host of platform, ship and crew safety standards may need to be considered. As autonomous platforms take on increasingly complex and dangerous duties, the rules of the road as well as security concerns merit substantial Coast Guard input. And with accidents expected as part of the process, worker, crew and gear rescue and recovery contingencies need to be scrubbed, rescrubbed and scrubbed again. Get Ready For Space Navies Good engineering that skates the boundaries of physics, regulation and law is always a flirtation with failure. With the future of space heading to sea, it is time for all the various maritime stakeholders out there to anticipate all the operational, legal and regulatory challenges and get about fixing them. If this fundamental support work doesn’t happen now, it won’t happen later. Space navies will simply take on a life of their own. And, as space navies grow and head to sea, the race to build recovery vessels, salvage ships, security platforms, oilers and other craft will charge ahead, only to be abruptly stopped by some sort of ugly sector-defining disaster or Titanic-like catastrophe that can, with a little bit of forethought now, be avoided in the exciting years to come. Follow me on