A Company to Sea: The Spaceport Company’s Marotta Explains Its Ambitions
By David Bullock
Staff Writer
To disrupt a $4 billion market, Tom Marotta and co-founder Ian Vorbach of The Spaceport Company seek to deliver commercial launch and reentry facilities to providers around the world, starting with ocean-based platforms.
“The Spaceport Company builds commercial launch and reentry sites for launch and reentry operators,” said Marotta. “The demands for launch sites are exceeding the supply.”
The two founders hope to cater to the dozens of new launch entrants and the hundreds of payloads that are planned to be launched, at a time where demand for launch is at its highest ever.
“The challenge to build new spaceports have come from a regulatory and local, political standpoint. So, moving the spaceport offshore will not eliminate regulatory concerns, but it does significantly reduce the regulatory obstacles for building a launch site. So much so that the benefits of expedited regulatory approval far exceed the costs of operating offshore,” Marotta added.
Marotta is an expert in regulatory matters and environmental planning and has years of experience at the FAA and private industry setting up spaceports. Vorbach is an MBA holding rocket propulsion engineer, with experience in startup entries and exits with previous experience at Stratolaunch.
The company is targeting two broad market segments, venture-class satellite launch and reentry. It is not only hard to find a place to launch from, but it is also hard for launch companies to have spaceports that could provide, what Marotta described as, “future growth.”
One of the first customers The Spaceport Company has a contract with is Varda Space. Varda has already put deposits to do reentry services.
Moreover, launch and reentry capabilities allow for global point-to-point travel for both customers and payloads.
“[One of our emerging] markets are point-to-point rocket transportation. There are several emerging companies that are well funded, well resourced with very highly credential staff building vertical landing vertical takeoff rockets that can go anywhere in the world in two hours,” Marotta said.
“One of our customers is New Frontier Aerospace, which is a DoD funded startup… and they are really excited to work with us so we can provide them a launch site model or an infrastructure model that is scalable. We can build facilities… that can be relatively easily replicated all over the world,” he added.
“Once we build our first spaceport off the coast of Florida… we can replicate that model in the ocean off the coast of any major city in the world. Now you’re getting this network of spaceports all around the world, where these point-to-point service providers can send people and cargo within two hours all around the world,” Marotta said.
The company already has an investor and fully funded for the next year at the pre-seed level. With this money, the company has enough to do regulatory approvals and design. It plans to have a seed round within the next six months to a year.
“That money will go to buying the ships, building the ships, doing the shakedown cruise and getting the facility ready to go. We plan to have our first operations in January of 2024,” Marotta said. “We do not need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Our capital requirements are relatively modest. We do not need to raise what an aerospace company needs to raise for an orbital class rocket, for example. We’re on the scale of millions to tens of millions [needed to be raised], well below a hundred million. We can get to an operational spaceport for relatively low amount of money.”
8 responses to “A Company to Sea: The Spaceport Company’s Marotta Explains Its Ambitions”
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If they really want to do this on the cheap they should buy the USS Kitty Hawk as surplus from the USN and reconfigure it as a mobile launch platform. Get rid of the island and engines and just tow it to different locations. Could reduce their capital needs by 90%.
It is, unfortunately, a few months too late for that. Both the Kitty Hawk, at Bremerton, and the John F. Kennedy, at Philadelphia, were sold for scrap last year. The two largest ex-USN ships that might still be available are the LHAs Tarawa and Peleliu, both currently in inactive storage at Pearl Harbor. There are also plenty of decommissioned supertankers around as well as many idle drilling rigs such as the pair SpaceX has purchased.
All the easier to buy them from the scrap firms that bought them from the USN.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Those ships are scrap for a reason. “Capital needs”? Puh-leez.
He knows exactly what he’s talking about, whereas you, as usual, are just talking. We all know you have a fine disregard for the cost of anything, but people who have to live in the real world cannot afford to take such a lofty attitude.
As to the reason these ships were sold for scrap, it is that, after five decades of service each, they were no longer suitable to continue in service as aircraft carriers. Absent any requirement to run at high speeds for extended periods, or to be pummeled by the percussive landings of large aircraft, I’m sure both ships have a lot of useful service life of a less strenuous nature left in them.
Very possible. The USN sold them to the shipbreakers for one U.S. cent apiece. That would seem to offer considerable latitude for the making of such a deal.
Update: It seems Kitty Hawk has been under tow since 15 Jan. and has just arrived in the vicinity of the breaker’s yard where she will scrapped. That happens to be in Brownsville, TX. I just watched video of her in the home stretch shot by a drone flown by RGV Aerial Photography, the same folks who do those weekly flyovers of Starbase. So it would seem time has run out for Kitty Hawk.
The 4+ months under tow I take to be attributable to the necessity of pulling Kitty Hawk all the way down the Pacific coast of South America, rounding the Horn, then proceeding all the way back up the Atlantic side in order to get to the Gulf and thence her final port of call. She’s just way too beamy to fit through the Panama Canal even after its recent widening.
Using the dry mass of the Saturn V first and second stage at 150 tons and 40 tons as a guide, partially fueling these Super Heavy Lift Vehicle stages and having them separately fly from a shore base to a Supertanker launch platform would likely be most efficient. The 17 ton payload of the CH-53K could lift the rest in separate trips. A Supertanker would have the ability to make it’s own liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellants by drawing power from an undersea cable.
The partially fueled separate stages coming and going from the launch ships would be far less of a hazard and noise problem, as well as the helicopters carrying other components.
That is certainly a possible concept of operations. The shore-to-ship hopping of large stages using limited propellant loads and a subset of installed engines, plus the helicopter delivery of smaller components, are both very sound ideas.
The undersea power cable thing would limit actual propellant generation to only places where such a hookup could be made. The world has many undersea comms cables, but not many that primarily carry electric power. The ship could still travel widely to launch and recover, but would spend a lot of time shuttling back and forth to its power source. There is also the non-trivial matter of installing LH2 and LOX tankage on a ship designed as a bulk crude oil carrier.
More logistical freedom, greater safety and less required sailing would attend a conops that involved delivery of propellant on a separate vessel or vessels – a petroleum tanker in the case of RP-1 or an LNG tanker in the case of methalox or of LOX used in combination with RP-1. LNG tankers are already built to transport large quantities of
cryogenics.
There’s also the matter of hydrolox as a booster propellant being on the way out. Most new rocket designs have settled on methalox for booster stages or stuck with the venerable RP-1.