Inside the race to find GPS alternatives

Later this month, an inconspicuous 150-kilogram satellite is set to launch into space aboard the SpaceX Transporter 14 mission. Once in orbit, it will test super-accurate next-generation satnav technology designed to make up for the shortcomings of the US Global Positioning System (GPS). 

The satellite is the first of a planned constellation called Pulsar, which is being developed by California-based Xona Space Systems. The company ultimately plans to have a constellation of 258 satellites in low Earth orbit. Although these satellites will operate much like those used to create GPS, they will orbit about 12,000 miles closer to Earth’s surface, beaming down a much stronger signal that’s more accurate—and harder to jam. 

“Just because of this shorter distance, we will put down signals that will be approximately a hundred times stronger than the GPS signal,” says Tyler Reid, chief technology officer and cofounder of Xona. “That means the reach of jammers will be much smaller against our system, but we will also be able to reach deeper into indoor locations, penetrating through multiple walls.”

A satnav system for the 21st century

The first GPS system went live in 1993. In the decades since, it has become one of the foundational technologies that the world depends on. The precise positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) signals beamed by its  satellites underpin much more than Google Maps in your phone. They guide drill heads at offshore oil rigs, time-stamp financial transactions, and help sync power grids all over the world.

But despite the system’s indispensable nature, the GPS signal is easily suppressed or disrupted by everything from space weather to 5G cell towers to phone-size jammers worth a few tens of dollars. The problem has been whispered about among experts for years, but it has really come to the fore in the last three years, since Russia invaded Ukraine. The boom in drone warfare that came to characterize that war also triggered a race to develop technology for thwarting drone attacks by jamming the GPS signals they need to navigate—or spoofing the signal, creating convincing but fake positioning data. 

The crucial problem is one of distance: The GPS constellation, which consists of 24 satellites plus a handful of spares, orbits 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers) above Earth, in a region known as medium Earth orbit. By the time their signals get all the way down to ground-based receivers, they are so faint that they can easily be overridden by jammers.

Other existing Global Navigation Satellite System constellations, such as Europe’s Galileo, Russia’s GLONASS, and China’s Beidou, have similar architectures and experience the same problems.

But when Reid and cofounder Brian Manning founded Xona Space Systems in 2019, they didn’t think about jamming and spoofing. Their goal was to make autonomous driving ready for prime time. 

AEROSPACELAB

Dozens of robocars from Uber and Waymo were already cruising American freeways at that time, equipped with expensive suites of sensors like high-resolution cameras and lidar. The engineers figured a more precise satellite navigation system could reduce the need for those sensors, making it possible to create a safe autonomous vehicle affordable enough to go mainstream. One day, cars might even be able to share their positioning data with one another, Reid says. But they knew that GPS was nowhere near accurate enough to keep self-driving cars within the lane lines and away from other objects on the road. That is especially true in densely built-up urban environments that provide many chances for signals to bounce off walls, creating errors.

“GPS has the superpower of being a ubiquitous system that works the same anywhere in the world,” Reid says. “But it’s a system that was designed primarily to support military missions, virtually to enable them to drop five bombs in the same bowl. But this meter-level accuracy is not enough to guide machines where they need to go and share that physical space with humans safely.”

Reid and Manning began to think about how to build a space-based PNT system that would do what GPS does but better, with accuracy of three inches (10 centimeters) or less and ironclad reliability in all sorts of challenging conditions.

The easiest way to do that is to bring the satellites closer to Earth so that data reaches receivers in real time without inaccuracy-causing delays. The stronger signal of satellites in low Earth orbit is more resistant to disruptions of all sorts. 

When GPS was conceived, none of that was possible. Constellations in low Earth orbit—altitudes up to 1,200 miles (2,000 km)—require hundreds of satellites to provide constant coverage over the entire globe. For a long time, space technology was too bulky and expensive to make such large constellations viable. Over the past decade, however, smaller electronics and lower launch costs have changed the equation.

“In 2019, when we started, the ecosystem of low Earth orbit was really exploding,” Reid says. “We could see things like Starlink, OneWeb, and other constellations take off.”

Matter of urgency

In the few years since Xona launched, concerns about GPS’s vulnerability have begun to grow amid rising geopolitical tensions. As a result, finding a reliable replacement has become a matter of strategic importance. 

In Ukraine especially, GPS jamming and spoofing have become so common that prized US precision munitions such as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System became effectively blind. Makers of first-person-view drones, which came to symbolize the war, had to refocus on AI-driven autonomous navigation to keep those drones in the game. 

The problem quickly spilled beyond Ukraine. Countries bordering Russia, such as Finland and Estonia, complained that the increasing prevalence of GPS jamming and spoofing was affecting commercial flights and ships in the region.

But Clémence Poirier, a space security researcher at ETH Zurich, says that the problem of GPS disruption isn’t limited to the vicinity of war zones.

“Basic jammers are very cheap and super easily accessible to everyone online,” Poirier says. “Even with the simplest ones, which can be the size of your phone, you can disrupt GPS signals in [an] area of a hundred or more meters.”

In 2013, a truck driver using such a device to conceal his location from his boss accidently disrupted GPS signals around the Newark airport in New Jersey. In 2022, the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport reported a 24-hour GPS outage, which prompted a temporary closure of one of its runways. The source of the interference was never identified. That same year, Denver International Airport experienced a 33-hour GPS disruption. 

Race to securing PNT

“Xona is a promising solution to enhance the resilience of GPS-dependent critical infrastructures and mitigate the threat of GPS jamming and spoofing,” Poirier says. But, she adds, there is no “magic wand,” and a “variety of different approaches will be needed” to solve the problem.

And indeed, Xona is not the only company hoping to provide a backup for the indispensable yet increasingly vulnerable GPS. Companies such as Anello Photonics, based in Santa Clara, California, and Sydney-based Advanced Navigation are testing terrestrial solutions: inertial navigation devices that are small and affordable enough for use beyond high-end military tech. These systems rely on gyroscopes and accelerometers to deduce a vehicle’s position from its own motions. 

When integrated into PNT receivers, these technologies can help detect GPS spoofing and take over for the duration of the interference. Inertial navigation has been around for decades, but recent advances in photonic technologies and microelectromechanical systems have brought it into the mainstream.

The French aerospace and defense conglomerate Safran is developing a system that distributes PNT data via  optical-fiber networks, which form the backbone of the global internet infrastructure. But the allure of space remains strong: The ability to reach any place at any time is what turned GPS from an obscure military system into a piece of taken-for-granted infrastructure that most people today can hardly live without.

And Xona could have some space-based competition. Virginia-based TrustPoint is currently raising funds to build its own low-Earth-orbit PNT constellation, and some have proposed that signals from SpaceX’s Starlink could be repurposed to provide PNT services as well.

Xona hopes to secure its spot in the market by designing its signal to be compatible with that of GPS, allowing manufacturers of GPS receivers to easily slot the new constellation into existing tech. 

Although it will take at least until 2030 for the entire constellation to be up and running, Reid says Xona’s system will provide a valuable addition to the existing GPS infrastructure as soon as 16 of its satellites are in orbit. 

The upcoming launch comes three years after a demonstration mission known as Huginn tested the basics of the technology. The new satellite, called Pulsar-0, will be used to see how well the system can resist jamming or spoofing.

Xona plans to launch an additional four spacecraft next year and hopes to have most of the constellation deployed by 2030. 

A new atomic clock in space could help us measure elevations on Earth

In 2003, engineers from Germany and Switzerland began building a bridge across the Rhine River simultaneously from both sides. Months into construction, they found that the two sides did not meet. The German side hovered 54 centimeters above the Swiss side.

The misalignment occurred because the German engineers had measured elevation with a historic level of the North Sea as its zero point, while the Swiss ones had used the Mediterranean Sea, which was 27 centimeters lower. We may speak colloquially of elevations with respect to “sea level,” but Earth’s seas are actually not level. “The sea level is varying from location to location,” says Laura Sanchez, a geodesist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. (Geodesists study our planet’s shape, orientation, and gravitational field.) While the two teams knew about the 27-centimeter difference, they mixed up which side was higher. Ultimately, Germany lowered its side to complete the bridge. 

To prevent such costly construction errors, in 2015 scientists in the International Association of Geodesy voted to adopt the International Height Reference Frame, or IHRF, a worldwide standard for elevation. It’s the third-dimensional counterpart to latitude and longitude, says Sanchez, who helps coordinate the standardization effort. 

Now, a decade after its adoption, geodesists are looking to update the standard—by using the most precise clock ever to fly in space.

That clock, called the Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space, or ACES, launched into orbit from Florida last month, bound for the International Space Station. ACES, which was built by the European Space Agency, consists of two connected atomic clocks, one containing cesium atoms and the other containing hydrogen, combined to produce a single set of ticks with higher precision than either clock alone. 

Pendulum clocks are only accurate to about a second per day, as the rate at which a pendulum swings can vary with humidity, temperature, and the weight of extra dust. Atomic clocks in current GPS satellites will lose or gain a second on average every 3,000 years. ACES, on the other hand, “will not lose or gain a second in 300 million years,” says Luigi Cacciapuoti, an ESA physicist who helped build and launch the device. (In 2022, China installed a potentially stabler clock on its space station, but the Chinese government has not publicly shared the clock’s performance after launch, according to Cacciapuoti.) 

From space, ACES will link to some of the most accurate clocks on Earth to create a synchronized clock network, which will support its main purpose: to perform tests of fundamental physics. 

But it’s of special interest for geodesists because it can be used to make gravitational measurements that will help establish a more precise zero point from which to measure elevation across the world.

Alignment over this “zero point” (basically where you stick the end of the tape measure to measure elevation) is important for international collaboration. It makes it easier, for example, to monitor and compare sea-level changes around the world. It is especially useful for building infrastructure involving flowing water, such as dams and canals. In 2020, the international height standard even resolved a long-standing dispute between China and Nepal over Mount Everest’s height. For years, China said the mountain was 8,844.43 meters; Nepal measured it at 8,848. Using the IHRF, the two countries finally agreed that the mountain was 8,848.86 meters. 

ESA-T. PEIGNIER

To create a standard zero point, geodesists create a model of Earth known as a geoid. Every point on the surface of this lumpy, potato-shaped model experiences the same gravity, which means that if you dug a canal at the height of the geoid, the water within the canal would be level and would not flow. Distance from the geoid establishes a global system for altitude.

However, the current model lacks precision, particularly in Africa and South America, says Sanchez. Today’s geoid has been built using instruments that directly measure Earth’s gravity. These have been carried on satellites, which excel at getting a global but low-resolution view, and have also been used to get finer details via expensive ground- and airplane-based surveys. But geodesists have not had the funding to survey Africa and South America as extensively as other parts of the world, particularly in difficult terrain such as the Amazon rainforest and Sahara Desert. 

To understand the discrepancy in precision, imagine a bridge that spans Africa from the Mediterranean coast to Cape Town, South Africa. If it’s built using the current geoid, the two ends of the bridge will be misaligned by tens of centimeters. In comparison, you’d be off by at most five centimeters if you were building a bridge spanning North America. 

To improve the geoid’s precision, geodesists want to create a worldwide network of clocks, synchronized from space. The idea works according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which states that the stronger the gravitational field, the more slowly time passes. The 2014 sci-fi movie Interstellar illustrates an extreme version of this so-called time dilation: Two astronauts spend a few hours in extreme gravity near a black hole to return to a shipmate who has aged more than two decades. Similarly, Earth’s gravity grows weaker the higher in elevation you are. Your feet, for example, experience slightly stronger gravity than your head when you’re standing. Assuming you live to be about 80 years old, over a lifetime your head will age tens of billionths of a second more than your feet. 

A clock network would allow geodesists to compare the ticking of clocks all over the world. They could then use the variations in time to map Earth’s gravitational field much more precisely, and consequently create a more precise geoid. The most accurate clocks today are precise enough to measure variations in time that map onto centimeter-level differences in elevation. 

“We want to have the accuracy level at the one-centimeter or sub-centimeter level,” says Jürgen Müller, a geodesist at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany. Specifically, geodesists would use the clock measurements to validate their geoid model, which they currently do with ground- and plane-based surveying techniques. They think that a clock network should be considerably less expensive.

ACES is just a first step. It is capable of measuring altitudes at various points around Earth with 10-centimeter precision, says Cacciapuoti. But the point of ACES is to prototype the clock network. It will demonstrate the optical and microwave technology needed to use a clock in space to connect some of the most advanced ground-based clocks together. In the next year or so, Müller plans to use ACES to connect to clocks on the ground, starting with three in Germany. Müller’s team could then make more precise measurements at the location of those clocks.

These early studies will pave the way for work connecting even more precise clocks than ACES to the network, ultimately leading to an improved geoid. The best clocks today are some 50 times more precise than ACES. “The exciting thing is that clocks are getting even stabler,” says Michael Bevis, a geodesist at Ohio State University, who was not involved with the project. A more precise geoid would allow engineers, for example, to build a canal with better control of its depth and flow, he says. However, he points out that in order for geodesists to take advantage of the clocks’ precision, they will also have to improve their mathematical models of Earth’s gravitational field. 

Even starting to build this clock network has required decades of dedicated work by scientists and engineers. It took ESA three decades to make a clock as small as ACES that is suitable for space, says Cacciapuoti. This meant miniaturizing a clock the size of a laboratory into the size of a small fridge. “It was a huge engineering effort,” says Cacciapuoti, who has been working on the project since he began at ESA 20 years ago. 

Geodesists expect they’ll need at least another decade to develop the clock network and launch more clocks into space. One possibility would be to slot the clocks onto GPS satellites. The timeline depends on the success of the ACES mission and the willingness of government agencies to invest, says Sanchez. But whatever the specifics, mapping the world takes time.

The world’s biggest space-based radar will measure Earth’s forests from orbit

Forests are the second-largest carbon sink on the planet, after the oceans. To understand exactly how much carbon they trap, the European Space Agency and Airbus have built a satellite called Biomass that will use a long-prohibited band of the radio spectrum to see below the treetops around the world. It will lift off from French Guiana toward the end of April and will boast the largest space-based radar in history, though it will soon be tied in orbit by the US-India NISAR imaging satellite, due to launch later this year.

Roughly half of a tree’s dry mass is made of carbon, so getting a good measure of how much a forest weighs can tell you how much carbon dioxide it’s taken from the atmosphere. But scientists have no way of measuring that mass directly. 

“To measure biomass, you need to cut the tree down and weigh it, which is why we use indirect measuring systems,” says Klaus Scipal, manager of the Biomass mission. 

These indirect systems rely on a combination of field sampling—foresters roaming among the trees to measure their height and diameter—and remote sensing technologies like lidar scanners, which can be flown over the forests on airplanes or drones and used to measure treetop height along lines of flight. This approach has worked well in North America and Europe, which have well-established forest management systems in place. “People know every tree there, take lots of measurements,” Scipal says. 

But most of the world’s trees are in less-mapped places, like the Amazon jungle, where less than 20% of the forest has been studied in depth on the ground. To get a sense of the biomass in those remote, mostly inaccessible areas, space-based forest sensing is the only feasible option. The problem is, the satellites we currently have in orbit are not equipped for monitoring trees. 

Tropical forests seen from space look like green plush carpets, because all we can see are the treetops; from imagery like this, we can’t tell how high or thick the trees are. Radars we have on satellites like Sentinel 1 use short radio wavelengths like those in the C band, which fall between 3.9 and 7.5 centimeters. These bounce off the leaves and smaller branches and can’t penetrate the forest all the way to the ground. 

This is why for the Biomass mission ESA went with P-band radar. P-band radio waves, which are about 10 times longer in wavelength, can see bigger branches and the trunks of trees, where most of their mass is stored. But fitting a P-band radar system on a satellite isn’t easy. The first problem is the size. 

“Radar systems scale with wavelengths—the longer the wavelength, the bigger your antennas need to be. You need bigger structures,” says Scipal. To enable it to carry the P-band radar, Airbus engineers had to make the Biomass satellite two meters wide, two meters thick, and four meters tall. The antenna for the radar is 12 meters in diameter. It sits on a long, multi-joint boom, and Airbus engineers had to fold it like a giant umbrella to fit it into the Vega C rocket that will lift it into orbit. The unfolding procedure alone is going to take several days once the satellite gets to space. 

Sheer size, though, is just one reason we have generally avoided sending P-band radars to space. Operating such radar systems in space is banned by International Telecommunication Union regulations, and for a good reason: interference. 

ESA-CNES-ARIANESPACE/OPTIQUE VIDéO DU CSG–S. MARTIN

“The primary frequency allocation in P band is for huge SOTR [single-object-tracking radars] Americans use to detect incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. That was, of course, a problem for us,” Scipal says. To get an exemption from the ban on space-based P-band radars, ESA had to agree to several limitations, the most painful of which was turning the Biomass radar off over North America and Europe to avoid interfering with SOTR coverage.

“This was a pity. It’s a European mission, so we wanted to do observations in Europe,” Scipal says. The rest of the world, though, is fair game.

The Biomass mission is scheduled to last five years. Calibration of the radar and other systems is going to take the first five months. After that, Biomass will enter its tomography phase, gathering data to create detailed biomass maps of the forests in India, Australia, Siberia, South America, Africa—everywhere but North America and Europe. “Tomography will work like a CT scan in a hospital. We will take images of each area from various different positions and create the 3D map of the forests,” Scipal says. 

Getting full, global coverage is expected to take 18 months. Then, for the rest of the mission, Biomass will switch to a different measurement method, capturing one full global map every nine months to measure how the condition of our forests changes over time. 

“The scientific goal here is to really understand the role of forests in the global carbon cycle. The main interest is the tropics because it’s the densest forest which is under the biggest threat of deforestation and the one we know the least about,” Scipal says.

Biomass is going to provide hectare-scale-resolution 3D maps of those tropical forests, including everything from the tree heights to ground topography—something we’ve never had before. But there are limits to what it can do. 

“One drawback is that we won’t get insights into seasonal deviations in forest throughout the year because of the time it takes for Biomass to do global coverage,” says Irena Hajnsek, a professor of Earth observation at ETH Zurich, who is not involved in the Biomass mission. And Biomass is still going to leave some of our questions about carbon sinks unanswered.

“In all our estimations of climate change, we know how much carbon is in the atmosphere, but we do not know so much about how much carbon is stored on land,” says Hajnsek. Biomass will have its limits, she says, since significant amounts of carbon are trapped in the soil in permafrost areas, which the mission won’t be able to measure.

“But we’re going to learn how much carbon is stored in the forests and also how much of it is getting released due to disturbances like deforestation or fires,” she says. “And that is going to be a huge contribution.”

Rivals are rising to challenge the dominance of SpaceX

SpaceX is a space launch juggernaut. In just two decades, the company has managed to edge out former aerospace heavyweights Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop Grumman to gain near-monopoly status over rocket launches in the US; it accounted for 87% of the country’s orbital launches in 2024, according to an analysis by SpaceNews. Since the mid-2010s, the company has dominated NASA’s launch contracts and become a major Pentagon contractor. It is now also the go-to launch provider for commercial customers, having lofted numerous satellites and five private crewed spaceflights, with more to come. 

Other space companies have been scrambling to compete for years, but developing a reliable rocket takes slow, steady work and big budgets. Now at least some of them are catching up. 

A host of companies have readied rockets that are comparable to SpaceX’s main launch vehicles. The list includes Rocket Lab, which aims to take on SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 with its Neutron rocket and could have its first launch in late 2025, and Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, which recently completed the first mission of a rocket it hopes will compete against SpaceX’s Starship. 

Some of these competitors are just starting to get rockets off the ground. And the companies could also face unusual headwinds, given that SpaceX’s Elon Musk has an especially close relationship with the Trump administration and has allies at federal regulatory agencies, including those that provide oversight of the industry.

But if all goes well, the SpaceX challengers can help improve access to space and prevent bottlenecks if one company experiences a setback. “More players in the market is good for competition,” says Chris Combs, an aerospace engineer at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “I think for the foreseeable future it will still be hard to compete with SpaceX on price.” But, he says, the competitors could push SpaceX itself to become better and provide those seeking access to space with a wider array of options..

A big lift

There are a few reasons why SpaceX was able to cement its position in the space industry. When it began in the 2000s, it had three consecutive rocket failures and seemed poised to fold. But it barreled through with Musk’s financial support, and later with a series of NASA and defense contracts. It has been a primary beneficiary of NASA’s commercial space program, developed in the 2010s with the intention of propping up the industry. 

“They got government contracts from the very beginning,” says Victoria Samson, a space policy expert at the Secure World Foundation in Broomfield, Colorado. “I wouldn’t say it’s a handout, but SpaceX would not exist without a huge influx of repeated government contracts. To this day, they’re still dependent on government customers, though they have commercial customers too.”

SpaceX has also effectively achieved a high degree of vertical integration, Samson points out: It owns almost all parts of its supply chain, designing, building, and testing all its major hardware components in-house, with a minimal use of suppliers. That gives it not just control over its hardware but considerably lower costs, and the price tag is the top consideration for launch contracts. 

The company was also open to taking risks other industry stalwarts were not. “I think for a very long time the industry looked at spaceflight as something that had to be very precise and perfect, and not a lot of room for tinkering,” says Combs. “SpaceX really was willing to take some risks and accept failure in ways that others haven’t been. That’s easier to do when you’re backed by a billionaire.” 

What’s finally enabled international and US-based competitors to emerge has been a growing customer base looking for launch services, along with some investors’ deep pockets. 

Some of these companies are taking aim at SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which can lift as much as about 20,000 kilograms into orbit and is used for sending multiple satellites or the crewed Dragon into space. “There is a practical monopoly in the medium-lift launch market right now, with really only one operational vehicle,” says Murielle Baker, a spokesperson for Rocket Lab, a US-New Zealand company.

Rocket Lab plans to take on the Falcon 9 with its Neutron rocket, which is expected to have its inaugural flight later this year from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The effort is building on the success of the company’s smaller Electron rocket, and Neutron’s first stage is intended to be reusable after it parachutes down to the ocean. 

Another challenger is Texas-based Firefly, whose Alpha rocket can be launched from multiple spaceports so that it can reach different orbits. Firefly has already secured NASA and Space Force contracts, with more launches coming this year (and on March 2 it also became the second private company to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon). Next year, Relativity Space aims to loft its first Terran R rocket, which is partially built from 3D-printed components. And the Bill Gates–backed Stoke Space aims to launch its reusable Nova rocket in late 2025 or, more likely, next year.

Competitors are also rising for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, holding out the prospect of more options for sending massive payloads to higher orbits and deep space. Furthest along is the Vulcan Centaur rocket, a creation of United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It’s expected to have its third and fourth launches in the coming months, delivering Space Force satellites to orbit. Powered by engines from Blue Origin, the Vulcan Centaur is slightly wider and shorter than the Falcon rockets. It currently isn’t reusable, but it’s less expensive than its predecessors, ULA’s Atlas V and Delta IV, which are being phased out. 

Mark Peller, the company’s senior vice president on Vulcan development and advanced programs, says the new rocket comes with multiple advantages. “One is overall value, in terms of dollars per pound to orbit and what we can provide to our customers,” he says, “and the second is versatility: Vulcan was designed to go to a range of orbits.” He says more than 80 missions are already lined up. 

Vulcan’s fifth flight, slated for no earlier than May, will launch the long-awaited Sierra Space Dream Chaser, a spaceplane that can carry cargo (and possibly crew) to the International Space Station. ULA also has upcoming Vulcan launches planned for Amazon’s Kuiper satellite constellation, a potential Starlink rival.

Meanwhile, though it took a few years, Blue Origin now has a truly orbital heavy-lift spacecraft: In January, it celebrated the inaugural launch of its towering New Glenn, a rocket that’s only a bit shorter than NASA’s Space Launch System and SpaceX’s Starship. Future flights could launch national security payloads. 

Competition is emerging abroad as well. After repeated delays, Europe’s heavy-lift Ariane 6, from Airbus subsidiary Arianespace, had its inaugural flight last year, ending the European Space Agency’s temporary dependence on SpaceX. A range of other companies are trying to expand European launch capacity, with assistance from ESA.

China is moving quickly on its own launch organizations too. “They had no less than seven ‘commercial’ space launch companies that were all racing to develop an effective system that could deliver a payload into orbit,” Kari Bingen, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says of China’s efforts. “They are moving fast and they have capital behind them, and they will absolutely be a competitor on the global market once they’re successful and probably undercut what US and European launch companies are doing.” The up-and-coming Chinese launchers include Space Pioneer’s reusable Tianlong-3 rocket and Cosmoleap’s Yueqian rocket. The latter is to feature a “chopstick clamp” recovery of the first stage, where it’s grabbed by the launch tower’s mechanical arms, similar to the concept SpaceX is testing for its Starship.

Glitches and government

Before SpaceX’s rivals can really compete, they need to work out the kinks, demonstrate the reliability of their new spacecraft, and show that they can deliver low-cost launch services to customers. 

The process is not without its challenges. Boeing’s Starliner delivered astronauts to the ISS on its first crewed flight in June 2024, but after thruster malfunctions, they were left stranded at the orbital outpost for nine months. While New Glenn reached orbit as planned, its first stage didn’t land successfully and its upper stage was left in orbit. 

SpaceX itself has had some recent struggles. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded the Falcon 9 more than once following malfunctions in the second half of 2024. The company still shattered records last year, though, with more than 130 Falcon 9 launches. It has continued with that record pace this year, despite additional Falcon 9 delays and more glitches with its booster and upper stage. SpaceX also conducted its eighth Starship test flight in March, just two months after the previous one, but both failed minutes after liftoff, raining debris down from the sky.

Any company must deal with financial challenges as well as engineering ones. Boeing is reportedly considering selling parts of its space business, following Starliner’s malfunctions and problems with its 737 Max aircraft. And Virgin Orbit, the launch company that spun off from Virgin Galactic, shuttered in 2023.

Another issue facing would-be commercial competitors to SpaceX in the US is the complex and uncertain political environment. Musk does not manage day-to-day operations of the company. But he has close involvement with DOGE, a Trump administration initiative that has been exerting influence on the workforces and budgets of NASA, the Defense Department, and regulators relevant to the space industry. 

Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who bankrolled the groundbreaking 2021 commercial mission Inspiration4, returned to orbit, again via a SpaceX craft, on Polaris Dawn last September. Now he may become Trump’s NASA chief, a position that could give him the power to nudge NASA toward awarding new lucrative contracts to SpaceX. In February it was reported that SpaceX’s Starlink might land a multibillion-dollar FAA contract previously awarded to Verizon. 

It is also possible that SpaceX could strengthen its position with respect to the regulatory scrutiny it has faced for environmental and safety issues at its production and launch sites on the coasts of Texas and Florida, as well as scrutiny of its rocket crashes and the resulting space debris. Oversight from the FAA, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency may be weak. Conflicts of interest have already emerged at the FAA, and the Trump administration has also attempted to incapacitate the National Labor Relations Board. SpaceX had previously tried to block the board from acting after nine workers accused the company of unfair labor practices.

SpaceX did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s requests for comment for this story.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of emphasis to relieve a lot of the regulations, in terms of environmental impact studies, and things like that,” Samson says. “I thought there’d be a separation between [Musk’s] interests, but now, it’s hard to say where he stops and the US government begins.”

Regardless of the politics, the commercial competition will surely heat up throughout 2025. But SpaceX has a considerable head start, Bingen argues: “It’s going to take a lot for these companies to effectively compete and potentially dislodge SpaceX, given the dominant position that [it has] had.”

Ramin Skibba is an astrophysicist turned science writer and freelance journalist, based in the Bay Are

Europe is finally getting serious about commercial rockets

Europe is on the cusp of a new dawn in commercial space technology. As global political tensions intensify and relationships with the US become increasingly strained, several European companies are now planning to conduct their own launches in an attempt to reduce the continent’s reliance on American rockets.

In the coming days, Isar Aerospace, a company based in Munich, will try to launch its Spectrum rocket from a site in the frozen reaches of Andøya island in Norway. A spaceport has been built there to support small commercial rockets, and Spectrum is the first to make an attempt.

“It’s a big milestone,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and spaceflight expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. “It’s long past time for Europe to have a proper commercial launch industry.”

Spectrum stands 28 meters (92 feet) tall, the length of a basketball court. The rocket has two stages, or parts, the first with nine engines—powered by an unusual fuel combination of liquid oxygen and propane not seen on other rockets before, which Isar says results in higher performance—and the second with a single engine to give satellites their final kick into orbit.

The ultimate goal for Spectrum is to carry satellites weighing up to 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds)  to low Earth orbit. On this first launch, however, there are no satellites on board, because success is anything but guaranteed. “It’s unlikely to make it to orbit,” says Malcolm Macdonald, an expert in space technology at Strathclyde University in Scotland. “The first launch of any rocket tends not to work.”

Regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, the launch attempt heralds an important moment as Europe tries to kick-start its own private rocket industry. Two other companies—Orbex of the UK and Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) of Germany—are expected to make launch attempts later this year. These efforts could give Europe multiple ways to reach space without having to rely on US rockets.  

“Europe has to be prepared for a more uncertain future,” says Macdonald. “The uncertainty of what will happen over the next four years with the current US administration amplifies the situation for European launch companies.”

Trailing in the US’s wake 

Europe has for years trailed behind the US in commercial space efforts. The successful launch of SpaceX’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, in 2008 began a period of American dominance of the global launch market. In 2024, 145 of 263 global launch attempts were made by US entities—and SpaceX accounted for 138 of those. “SpaceX is the benchmark at the moment,” says Jonas Kellner, head of marketing, communications, and political affairs at RFA. Other US companies, like Rocket Lab (which launches from both the US and New Zealand), have also become successful, while commercial rockets are ramping up in China, too.

Europe has launched its own government-funded Ariane and Vega rockets for decades from the Guiana Space Centre, a spaceport it operates in French Guiana in South America. Most recently, on March 6, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched its new heavy-lift Ariane 6 rocket from there for the first time. However, the history of rocket launches from Europe itself is much more limited. In 1997 the US defense contractor Northrop Grumman air-launched a Pegasus rocket from a plane that took off from the Canary Islands. In 2023 the US company Virgin Orbit failed to reach orbit with its LauncherOne rocket after a launch attempt from Cornwall in the UK. No vertical orbital rocket launch has ever been attempted from Western Europe.

Isar Aerospace is one of a handful of companies hoping to change that with help from agencies like ESA, which has provided funding to rocket launch companies through its Boost program since 2019. In 2024 it awarded €44.22 million ($48 million) to Isar, Orbex, RFA, and the German launch company HyImpulse. The hope is that one or more of the companies will soon begin regular launches from Europe from two potential sites: Isar’s chosen location in Andøya and the SaxaVord Spaceport on the Shetland Islands north of the UK, where RFA and Orbex plan to make their attempts. 

“I expect four or five companies to get to the point of launching, and then over a period of years reliability and launch cadence [or frequency] will determine which one or two of them survives,” says McDowell.

ISAR AEROSPACE

Unique advantages

In their initial form these rockets will not rival anything on offer from SpaceX in terms of size and cadence. SpaceX sometimes launches its 70-meter (230-foot) Falcon 9 rocket multiple times per week and is developing its much larger Starship vehicle for missions to the moon and Mars. However, the smaller European rockets can allow companies in Europe to launch satellites to orbit without having to travel all the way across the Atlantic. “There is an advantage to having it closer,” says Kellner, who says it will take RFA one or two days by sea to get its rockets to SaxaVord, versus one or two weeks to travel across the Atlantic.

Launching from Europe is useful, too, for reaching specific orbits. Traditionally, a lot of satellite launches have taken place near the equator, in places such as Cape Canaveral in Florida, to get an extra boost from Earth’s rotation. Crewed spacecraft have also launched from these locations to reach space stations in equatorial orbit around Earth and the moon. From Europe, though, satellites can launch north over uninhabited stretches of water to reach polar orbit, which can allow imaging satellites to see the entirety of Earth rotate underneath them.

Increasingly, says McDowell, companies want to place satellites into sun-synchronous orbit, a type of polar orbit where a satellite orbiting Earth stays in perpetual sunlight. This is useful for solar-powered vehicles. “By far the bulk of the commercial market now is sun-synchronous polar orbit,” says McDowell. “So having a high-latitude launch site that has good transport links with customers in Europe does make a difference.”

Europe’s end goal

In the longer term, Europe’s rocket ambitions might grow to vehicles that are more of a match for the Falcon 9 through initiatives like ESA’s European Launcher Challenge, which will award contracts later this year. “We are hoping to develop [a larger vehicle] in the European Launcher Challenge,” says Kellner. Perhaps Europe might even consider launching humans into space one day on larger rockets, says Thilo Kranz, ESA’s program manager for commercial space transportation. “We are looking into this,” he says. “If a commercial operator comes forward with a smart way of approaching [crewed] access to space, that would be a favorable development for Europe.”

A separate ESA project called Themis, meanwhile, is developing technologies to reuse rockets. This was the key innovation of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, allowing the company to dramatically drive down launch costs. Some European companies, like MaiaSpace and RFA, are also investigating reusability. The latter is planning to use parachutes to bring the first stage of its rocket back to a landing in the sea, where it can be recovered.

“As soon as you get up to something like a Falcon 9 competitor, I think it’s clear now that reusability is crucial,” says McDowell. “They’re not going to be economically competitive without reusability.”

The end goal for Europe is to have a sovereign rocket industry that reduces its reliance on the US. “Where we are in the broader geopolitical situation probably makes this a bigger point than it might have been six months ago,” says Macdonald.

The continent has already shown it can diversify from the US in other ways. Europe now operates its own successful satellite-based alternative to the US Global Positioning System (GPS), called Galileo; it began launching in 2011 and is four times more accurate than its American counterpart. Isar Aerospace, and the companies that follow, might be the first sign that commercial European rockets can break from America in a similar way.

“We need to secure access to space,” says Kranz, “and the more options we have in launching into space, the higher the flexibility.”

Should we be moving data centers to space?

Last week, the Florida-based company Lonestar Data Holdings launched a shoebox-size device carrying data from internet pioneer Vint Cerf and the government of Florida, among others, on board Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander. When its device lands on the moon later this week, the company will be the first to explicitly test out a question that has been on some technologists’ minds of late: Maybe it’s time to move data centers off Earth?

After all, energy-guzzling data centers are springing up like mushrooms all over the world, devouring precious land, straining our power grids, consuming water, and emitting noise. Building facilities in orbit or on or near the moon might help ameliorate many of these issues. 

For Steve Eisele, Lonestar’s president and chief revenue officer, a big appeal of putting data storage on the moon is security. “Ultimately, the moon can be the safest option where you can have a backup for your data,” Eisele says. “It’s harder to hack; it’s way harder to penetrate; it’s above any issues on Earth, from natural disasters to power outages to war.”

Lonestar’s device is equipped with eight terabytes of storage, about as much as a high-end laptop. It will last for just a couple of weeks before lunar night descends, temperatures plummet, and solar power runs out. But the company expects that to be enough time to test practicalities like downloading and uploading data and verifying secure data transfer protocols.

And it has bigger plans. As early as 2027, the company aims to launch a commercial data storage service using a bunch of satellites placed in the Earth-moon Lagrange point L1, a gravitationally stable point 61,350 kilometers above the moon’s surface. There, the spacecraft would have a constant view of Earth to allow continuous data access.

Other companies have similar aspirations. The US space company Axiom, best known for organizing short trips to the International Space Station for private astronauts, intends to launch a prototype server to the station in the coming months. By 2027, the firm wants to set up a computing node in low Earth orbit aboard its own space station module. 

A company called Starcloud, based in Washington state, is also betting on the need to process data in space. The company, which raised an $11 million round in December and more since then, wants to launch a small data-crunching satellite fitted with Nvidia GPUs later this year. 

Axiom sees an urgent need for computing capacity in space beyond simply providing an untouchable backup for earthly data. Today’s growing fleets of Earth- and space-observing satellites struggle with bandwidth limitations. Before users can glean any insights from satellite observations, the images must be downlinked to ground stations sparsely scattered around the planet and sent over to data centers for processing, which leads to delays.

“Data centers in space will help expedite many use cases,” says Jason Aspiotis, the global director of in-space data and security at Axiom. “The time from seeing something to taking action is very, very important for national security and for some scientific applications as well. A computer in space would also save costs that you need to bring all the data to the ground.”

But for these data centers to succeed, they must be able to withstand harsh conditions in space, pull in enough solar energy to operate, and make economic sense. Enthusiasts say the challenges are more tractable than they might appear—especially if you take into account some of the issues with data centers on Earth.

Better in space?

The current boom in AI and crypto mining is raising concerns about the environmental impact of computing infrastructure on Earth. Currently, data centers eat up around 1% or 2% of the world’s electricity. This number could double by 2030 alone, according to a Goldman Sachs report published last year. 

Space-tech aficionados think orbiting data centers could solve the problem.

“Data centers on Earth need a lot of power to operate, which means they have a high carbon footprint,” says Damien Dumestier, a space systems architect at the European aerospace conglomerate Thales Alenia Space. “They also produce a lot of heat, so you need water to cool them. None of that is a problem in space, where you have unlimited access to solar power and where you can simply radiate excess heat into space.”

Dumestier, who led an EU-funded study on the feasibility of placing large-scale IT infrastructure in Earth’s orbit, also sees space as a more secure option than Earth for data transportation and storage. Subsea fiber-optic cables are vulnerable to sabotage and natural disasters, like the undersea volcanic eruption that cut Tonga off from the web for two weeks.

High above Earth, data centers connected with unhackable laser links would be much harder to cut off or penetrate. Barring antisatellite missiles, space-based nuke explosions, or interceptor robots, these computing superhubs would be nigh untouchable. That is, except for micrometeorites and pieces of space debris, which spacecraft can dodge and, to some extent, be engineered to withstand. 

Outside of Earth’s protective atmosphere, the electronic equipment would also be exposed to energetic particles from the sun, which could damage it over time. Axiom plans to tackle the problem by using hardened military equipment, which Aspiotis says survives well in extreme environments. Lonestar thinks it could avoid the harsh radiation near the moon by ultimately placing its data centers in lava tubes under the lunar surface.

Then there is the matter of powering these facilities. Although solar power in Earth’s orbit is free and constantly available, it’s never previously been harvested in amounts needed to power data infrastructure at the scale existing on Earth. 

The Thales Alenia Space study, called ASCEND (an acronym for “advanced space cloud for European net zero emission and data sovereignty”), envisions orbiting data platforms twice as large as the International Space Station, the largest space structure built to date. The server racks at the heart of the ASCEND platforms would be powered by vast solar arrays producing a megawatt of power, equivalent to the electricity consumption of about 500 Western households. In comparison, the solar panels on the ISS produce only about one-quarter that amount—240 kilowatts at full illumination.

Launch costs—and the environmental effects of rocket launches—also complicate the picture. For space-based data centers to be an environmental win, Dumestier says, the carbon footprint of rocket flights needs to improve. He says SpaceX’s Starship, which is designed to carry very large loads and so could be cheaper and more efficient for each kilogram launched, is a major step in the right direction—and might pave the way for the deployment of large-scale orbital data centers by 2030. 

Aspiotis echoes those views: “There is a point in the not-too-distant future where data centers in space are as economical as they are on the ground,” he says. “In which case do we want them on the ground, where they are consuming power, water, and other kinds of utilities, including real estate?”

Domenico Vicinanza, an associate professor of intelligent systems and data science at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, tempers the optimism, however. He says that moving data centers to space en masse is still a bit of a moonshot. Robotic technologies that could assemble and maintain such large-scale structures do not yet exist, and hardware failures in the harsh orbital environment would increase maintenance costs. 

“Fixing problems in orbit is far from straightforward. Even with robotics and automation, there are limits to what can be repaired remotely,” Vicinanza says. “While space offers the benefit of 24-7 solar energy, solar flares and cosmic radiation could damage sensitive electronic equipment and current electronics, from mainstream microchips to memories that are not built and tested to work in space.”

He also notes that any collisions could further crowd Earth orbit with space debris. “Any accidental damage to the data center could create cascading debris, further complicating orbital operations,” he says.

But even if we don’t move data centers off Earth, supporters say it’s technology we will need to expand our presence in space. 

“The lunar economy will grow, and within the next five years we will need digital infrastructure on the moon,” Eisele says. “We will have robots that will need to talk to each other. Governments will set up scientific bases and will need digital infrastructure to support their needs not only on the moon but also for going to Mars and beyond. That will be a big part of our future.”

Nokia is putting the first cellular network on the moon

Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second lunar mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The plan is to deploy a lander, a rover, and hopper to explore a site near the lunar south pole that could harbor water ice, and to put a communications satellite on lunar orbit. 

But the mission will also bring something that’s never been installed on the moon or anywhere else in space before—a fully functional 4G cellular network. 

Point-to-point radio communications, which need a clear line of sight between transmitting and receiving antennas, have always been a backbone of both surface communications and the link back to Earth, starting with the Apollo program. Using point-to-point radio in space wasn’t much of an issue in the past because there never have been that many points to connect. Usually, it was just a single spacecraft, a lander, or a rover talking to Earth. And they didn’t need to send much data either.

“They were based on [ultra high frequency] or [very high frequency] technologies connecting a small number of devices with relatively low data throughput”, says Thierry Klein, president of Nokia Bell Labs Solutions Research, which was contracted by NASA to design a cellular network for the moon back in 2020. 

But it could soon get way more crowded up there: NASA’s Artemis program calls for bringing the astronauts back to the moon as early as 2028 and further expanding that presence into a permanent habitat in 2030s. 

The shift from mostly point-to-point radio communications to a full-blown cell network architecture should result in higher data transfer speeds, better range, and increase the number of devices that could be connected simultaneously, Klein says. But the harsh conditions of space travel and on the lunar surface  make it difficult to use Earth-based cell technology straight off the shelf. 

Instead, Nokia designed components that are robust against radiation, extreme temperatures, and the sorts of vibrations that will be experienced during the launch, flight, and landing. They put all these components in a single “network in a box”, which contains everything needed for a cell network except the antenna and a power source.

“We have the antenna on the lander, so together with the box that’s essentially your base station and your tower”, Klein says. The box will be powered by the lander’s solar panels.

During the IM-2 mission, the 4G cell network will allow for communication between the lander and the two vehicles. The network will likely only work for a few days— the spacecraft are not likely to survive after night descends on the lunar surface. 

But Nokia has plans for a more expansive 4G or 5G cell network that can cover the planned Artemis habitat and its surroundings. The company is also working on integrating cell communications in Axiom spacesuits meant for future lunar astronauts. “Maybe just one network in a box, one tower, would provide the entire coverage or maybe we would need multiple of these. That’s not going to be different from what you see in terrestrial cell networks deployment”, Klein says. He says the network should grow along with the future lunar economy. 

Not everyone is happy with this vision. LTE networks usually operate between 700 MHz and 2.6 GHz, a region of the radiofrequency spectrum that partially overlaps with frequencies reserved for radio astronomy. Having such radio signals coming from the moon could potentially interfere with observations.

“Telescopes are most sensitive in the direction that they are pointing–up towards the sky”, Chris De Pree, deputy spectrum manager at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) said in an email. Communication satellites like Starlink often end up in the radio telescopes’ line of sight. A full-scale cell network on the moon would add further noise to the night sky. 

There is also a regulatory hurdle that must be worked around. There are radio bands that have been internationally allocated to support lunar missions, and the LTE band is not among them. “Using 4G frequencies on or around the moon is a violation of the ITU-R radio regulations”, NRAO’s spectrum manager Harvey Liszt explained in an email.

To legally deploy the 4G network on the moon, Nokia received a waiver specifically for the IM-2 mission. “For permanent deployment we’ll have to pick a different frequency band,” Klein says. “We already have a list of candidate frequencies to consider.” Even with the frequency shift, Klein says Nokia’s lunar network technology will remain compatible with terrestrial 4G or 5G standards.

And that means that if you happened to bring your smartphone to the moon, and it somehow survived both the trip and the brutal lunar conditions, it should work on the moon just like it does here on Earth. “It would connect if we put your phone on the list of approved devices”, Klein explains. All you’d need is a lunar SIM card.

The dream of offshore rocket launches is finally blasting off

Want to send something to space? Get in line. The demand for rides off Earth is skyrocketing, pushing even the busiest spaceports, like Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, to their operational limits. Orbital launches worldwide have more than doubled over the past four years, from about 100 to 250 annually. That number is projected to spiral further up this decade, fueled by an epic growth spurt in the commercial space sector.

To relieve the congestion, some mission planners are looking to the ocean as the next big gateway to space. China has sent more than a dozen space missions from ocean platforms since 2019, most recently in January 2025. Italy’s space program has announced it will reopen its ocean launchpad off the coast of Kenya, while German space insiders envision an offshore spaceport in the North Sea. In the US, the idea of sea launches has attracted attention from heavyweights like SpaceX and inspired a new startup called the Spaceport Company. 

Launching rockets from offshore platforms like barges or oil rigs has a number of advantages. For one thing, it dramatically expands potential locations to lift off from, especially along the equator (this provides rockets with a natural speed boost because, thanks to geometry, the equator moves faster than the poles). At the same time, it is potentially safer and more environmentally friendly, placing launches further from population centers and delicate ecosystems. 

Ocean launches have taken place on and off for decades. But the renewed interest in offshore spaceports raises a host of questions about the unique regulatory, geopolitical, and environmental trade-offs of sea-based launches. It also offers a glimpse of new technologies and industries, enabled by a potentially limitless launch capacity, that could profoundly reshape our lives.

“The best way to build a future where we have dozens, hundreds, or maybe thousands of spaceports is to build them at sea,” says Tom Marotta, CEO and founder of the Spaceport Company, which is working to establish offshore launch hubs. “It’s very hard to find a thousand acres on the coast over and over again to build spaceports. It’s very easy to build the same ship over and over again.”

The saga of sea launches

The vision of oceanic spaceports is almost as old as rocketry itself. The first large rocket to take off from sea was a V2, the notorious missile developed by Germany in World War II and subsequently adopted by the United States, which the US Navy launched from the aircraft carrier USS Midway south of Bermuda on September 6, 1947. 

As it turned out, the inaugural flight was a bit of a mixed bag. Neal Casey, an 18-year-old technician stationed on the Midway, later recalled how the missile tilted dangerously starboard and headed toward  the vessel’s own command center, known as the island.

“I had no problem tracking the rocket,” said Casey, according to the USS Midway Museum. “It almost hit the island.”

Despite this brush with disaster, the test was considered a success because it proved that launching rockets from sea platforms was technically feasible. That revelation enabled the proliferation of missile-armed vessels, like warships or submarines, that have prowled the sea ever since.

Of course, missiles are designed to hit targets on Earth, not venture into space. But in the early 1960s Robert Truax, an American rocketry engineer, began pursuing a spectacular vision: the Sea Dragon. 

Standing nearly 500 feet tall, it would have been by far the biggest rocket in history, towering over the Apollo Program’s Saturn V or SpaceX’s Starship. No launchpad on land could withstand the force of its liftoff. A rocket this gargantuan could only be launched from a submerged position beneath the sea, rising out of the water like a breaching whale and leaving whirlpools swirling in its wake.

Truax proposed this incredible idea in 1963 while he was working at the rocket and missile manufacturer Aerojet General. He was even able to test a few small prototypes, including the Sea Bee, which was fired from under the waters of San Francisco Bay. Though the Sea Dragon never became a reality, the concept captured the imaginations of space dreamers for decades; most recently, it was depicted bursting from the ocean in the Apple+ series For All Mankind.  

Truax was eerily prescient about many future trends in spaceflight, and indeed, various governments and private entities have developed offshore launch platforms to take advantage of the flexibility offered by the seas.

“The most wanted launching sites are close to the equator,” says Gerasimos Rodotheatos, an assistant professor of international law and security at the American University in the Emirates who has researched sea-based launches. “Many countries there are hard to deal with because of political instability or because they don’t have the infrastructure. But if you’re using a platform or a vessel, it’s easier to select your location.”

Another major advantage is safety. “You’re far away from cities,” Rodotheatos adds. “You’re far away from land. You’re minimizing the risk of any accidents or any failures.”

For these reasons, rockets have intermittently lifted off from sea for nearly 60 years, beginning with Italy’s Luigi Broglio Malindi Space Center, a retrofitted oil rig off the coast of Kenya that launched orbital missions from the 1960s to the 1980s and may soon reopen after a nearly 40-year hiatus. 

Sea Launch, a multinational company founded in 1995, launched dozens of missions into orbit from the LP Odyssey, another repurposed drilling rig. The company might still be in business if Russia had not annexed Crimea in 2014, a move that prompted the venture—a partnership between Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Norway—to shutter later the same year. 

The saga of Sea Launch proved that offshore launches could be commercially profitable, but it also exposed gray areas in international marine and space law. For instance, while Sea Launch was a venture between four spacefaring nations, it registered its rig and vessels to Liberia, which has been interpreted as a flag of convenience. Such strategies could present the opportunity for companies or other entities to evade certain labor laws, tax obligations, and environmental regulations.  

“Some states are very strict on the nationality and transparency of ownership, and other states less strict,” says Alla Pozdnakova, a professor of law at the University of Oslo’s Scandinavian Institute for Maritime Law, who has researched sea-based launches. “For now, it seems that it hasn’t been really that problematic because the United States, for example, would require that if you’re a US citizen or a US company, then you have to apply for a license from the US space authorities, regardless of where you want to launch.”

But if the US imposes strict oversight on launches, other nations might apply different standards to licensing agreements with launch providers. “I can imagine that some unauthorized projects may become possible simply because they are on the seas and there is no real authority—by contrast to land-based space launches—to supervise those kinds of launches,” Pozdnakova says.

Boeing, which managed Sea Launch, was fined $10 million in 1998 by the US Department of State for allegedly sharing information about American defense technology with its foreign partners in violation of the Arms Export Control Act. In addition to the legal and national security risks posed by Sea Launch, Pacific Island nations raised concerns to the United Nations in 1999 that the company’s offshore rockets could damage the environment by, for instance, creating oil slicks from unused fuel in discarded boosters. 

The complex issues that offshore spaceports raise for international law, environmental protection, and launch access have never been more relevant. SpaceX, which is famous for pioneering offshore rocket landings, has also flirted with sea-based launches. The company went so far as to purchase two oil rigs for $3.5 million apiece in 2020. They were renamed Deimos and Phobos after the two moons of Mars.

“SpaceX is building floating, superheavy-class spaceports for Mars, moon & hypersonic travel around Earth,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted on Twitter (when it was still Twitter) in 2020. 

SpaceX eventually abandoned this project and sold the rigs, though Gwynne Shotwell, its president and COO, said in 2023 that sea-based launches were likely to be part of the company’s future. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. 

The company might need to move launch operations offshore if it wants to carry through on its aspirations for Starship, which is the most powerful rocket ever developed and the keystone of SpaceX’s future plans to send humans to the moon and Mars. “We have designed Starship to be as much like aircraft operations as we possibly can get it,” she said at a conference in 2023, according to SpaceNews. “We want to talk about dozens of launches a day, if not hundreds of launches a day.” 

The environmental impact of launching hundreds of rockets a day, either from sea or land, is not known. While offshore launches pose fewer direct risks to local environments than land launches, very little is understood about the risks that rocket emissions and chemical pollution pose to the climate and human health at current levels, much less exponentially higher ones. 

“It’s hard to deny that launching or emitting anything further from people is usually better,” says Sebastian Eastham, the senior lecturer in sustainable aviation at Imperial College London, who studies aerospace emissions and their environmental impacts. “But when we say that we’re concerned about the emissions, it is incomplete to say that we’re not launching near people, so people aren’t going to be affected.”

“I really hope that we find out that the impacts are small,” he continues. “But because you have this very rapid growth in launch emissions, you can’t sample now and say that this is representative of what it’s going to be like in five years. We’re nowhere near a steady state.”

In other words, rocket launches have been largely overlooked as a source of greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution, simply because they have been too rare to be considered a major contributor. As space missions ramp up around the world, experts must aim to constrain the impact on climate change, the ozone layer, and pollution from spent parts that burn up in the atmosphere. 

The McDonald’s of spaceports

Offshore launches are almost routine in China, where companies like Galactic Energy, Orienspace, and the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation have expanded orbital liftoffs from barges. (None of these companies responded to a request for comment.) 

But at the moment, sea-based launches are limited to small rockets that can deploy payloads of a few thousand pounds to orbit. No ocean spaceport is currently equipped to handle the world’s most powerful rockets, like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which can deliver more than 140,000 pounds to orbit. There are also currently no public plans to invest in sea-based infrastructure for heavy-lift rockets, but that may change if smaller offshore spaceports prove to be reliable and affordable options.

“All the activities now are based on off-the-shelf technologies,” Rodotheatos says, meaning facilities like oil rigs or barges. “If one company makes an investment to design and implement a floating platform from zero, specifically fitted for that purpose, I expect to see a big change.” 

Tom Marotta founded the Spaceport Company in 2022 with a similar long-term vision in mind. After working both for the space company Astra and on the regulatory side at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, Marotta observed what he calls a “spaceport bottleneck” that had to be addressed to keep pace with the demands of the commercial space sector.  

To that end, the Spaceport Company procured a former US Navy training vessel, named the Once in a Lifetime after the Talking Heads song, as its first launchpad. The company is currently serving customers for suborbital space missions and missile tests, but its broader vision is to establish a network of scalable orbital spaceports across the ocean.

“We want to be the McDonald’s of spaceports, and build a model that can be repeated and copied-and-pasted all around the world,” Marotta says.

Marotta sees boundless applications for such a network. It could expand launch capacity without threatening coastal ecosystems or provoking pushback from local communities. It could serve as a reliable backup option for busy spaceports on land. It could give nations that normally don’t have access to spaceflight an affordable option for their own launch services. 

“Many nations want their own sovereign orbital launch capability, but they don’t want to spend a billion dollars to build a launchpad that might only be used once or twice,” Marotta says. “We see an opportunity there to basically give them a launchpad on demand.”

Marotta also has another dream in mind: ocean platforms could help to enable point-to-point rocket travel, capable of transporting cargo and passengers anywhere on Earth in under 90 minutes.

“You’re going to need dedicated and exclusive use of rockets off the coasts of major cities to serve that point-to-point rocket travel concept,” Marotta says. “This is science fiction right now, but I would not be surprised if in the next five years we see [organizations], particularly the military, experimenting with point-to-point rocket cargo.” 

Offshore launches currently represent a small tile in the global space mosaic, but they could dramatically change our lives in the coming decades. What that future might look like, with all of its risks and benefits, depends on the choices that companies, governments, and the public make right now.

Becky Ferreira is a science reporter based in Ithaca, NY. She writes the weekly Abstract column for 404 Media and is the author of the upcoming book First Contact, about the search for alien life.