Our favorite competitor in professional mariner news, Marine-Buzz.com, recently had an exceptional post on maritime technology used to launch rockets into space.
Having seen ships being used as a Hospital, University, Museum, promoting fashion, its time now to see a ship being used as a Platform to launch satellites. Sea Launch is preparing to launch a Zenit-3SL rocket with a Thuraya-3 communication satellite shortly from a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean. To view live web telecast click here.
The Sea Launch is the world’s first ever commercial international project to develop and operate a sea-based space launch system. The main objective of this project is to launch satellites from a mobile sea-based launch platform.
The key advantages of the Sea Launch system over ground launch sites are as follows:
- Ability to launch directly from the equator thus reducing unit costs of their delivery to the target orbit.
- Ability to launch with any azimuth from open sea, thus making launches free of political risks.
- Compactness, no need to have a well-developed ground infrastructure and its associated social support (roads, power, hotels, schools, hospitals, etc.), which radically reduces the numbers of personnel participating in the work, and, therefore, the cost of operation.
- Ability to process spacecraft for launch on the US territory (Long Beach, CA), virtually in an “urban” environment.
Being the closest marine technology company to gCaptain HQ, Sea Launch is a company that interests us greatly… we only wish we had gotten to the story sooner!
You can find MarineBuzz’s exhaustive review of SeaLaunch technology including additional photos HERE.
Tags: · communication_satellite, floating_platform, ground_infrastructure, international_project, launch_system, Marine Technology, marine_technology, maritime_technology, orbit, professional_mariner, satellites, sealaunch, sea_launch, space_launch, urban_environment, zenit_3sl_rocket
We don’t usually publish press releases on gCaptain but we can’t help to be excited by new solutions for offering “High” Speed internet at sea. Marine Norway points us to this:
The introduction of FleetBroadband has pushed high-speed internet into the
marine mainstream, however, the pricing per megabyte of data puts the full
benefits of broadband usage out of reach of many vessels. Wired Ocean can
reduce the costs per megabyte of shore-to-ship FleetBroadband data to
approximately 10% by channelling the downlink through a vessel’s satellite TV
antenna.
When used in conjunction with FleetBroadband, the Wired Ocean SBS brings with
it a tangible increase in downlink speed - a Wired Ocean downlink can be almost
twice the speed of a standard FB250 downlink without the Wired Ocean SBS
integrated. This makes the system ideal for high volume applications such as
internet browsing, downloading email with attachments, obtaining electronic
manuals and weather and navigation data for bridge and critical systems. Continue Reading…
Tags: · communication_satellite, inmarsat, internet
