SpaceX looking to add offshore rocket launch facility

SpaceX is looking to add an offshore rocket launch facility to the infrastructure it’s building in South Texas, according to company job postings seeking offshore operations engineers and offshore system technicians. Report informs citing the Houston Chronicle.

Founded by billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX has been developing, and testing prototypes of its Starship spacecraft planned to take people to the moon, Mars, and beyond at a launch site just outside Brownsville. Now, it appears that Musk wants floating launchpads, too. “SpaceX is building floating, superheavy-class spaceports for Mars, moon & hypersonic travel around Earth,” Musk said on Twitter.

It’s the latest announcement in a now six-year adventure for those living in South Texas. The company announced it would build a launch site for its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets near Boca Chica Beach in 2014, but the proposed launch site sat idle for several years. Construction was delayed by the unstable ground that required trucking in 310,000 cubic yards of soil to cover a football field 13 to 14 stories tall, to settle and compress the land. Anomalies during a flight to the International Space Station in 2015 and a launchpad test a year later also forced the company to put Boca Chica on the back burner. Activity increased gradually and then suddenly. And it wasn’t with the planned Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets initially. SpaceX opted to build and test a 65-foot-tall prototype called the Starhopper. In April 2019, SpaceX fired its first engine at the Texas launch site. The prototype made a tethered hop that same month. Then came two hover tests in July and August, the latter having the Starhopper lift itself to nearly 500 feet before returning safely to Earth.