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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.

Episode 4 of “Messing About In Ships“, our joint-venture podcast with Sea-Fever, has been posted to iTunes. This week’s topics include;

A Mariner’s Perspective

Captain Kelly Sweeney, master mariner, monthly contributor to Professional Mariner magazine and author of From the Bridge: Authentic Modern Sea Stories; discusses the importance of new media tools like blogs and podcasts to the professional mariner.

Sea Stories

John - Report on Empress of the North grounding.

Peter - Discoverer News “Winged ships exempt from speed restrictions” submitted by wb6nah (Captain Richard Rodriguez)

Internet Ports of Call

Peter’s recommendation: The Bitter End blog - http://captrichardrodriguez.blogspot.com/

John’s recommendation: NowPublic - http://www.nowpublic.com/

This Week’s Music

The New Year by Love = Action (Jacoby Jennings) from the Podsafe Music Network

Subscribe via iTunes

Also be sure to check out our fellow maritime podcasters Bob Couttie of Maritime Accident Casebook and Raina Clark of Great Lakes Maritime Issues.

 

 Messing About In Ships - Episode 4: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This week’s highlights include:

• the introduction of a new feature, “A Mariner’s Perspective” with Master Mariner Captain Kelly Sweeney, monthly contributor to Professional Mariner magazine and author of From the Bridge: Authentic Modern Sea Stories;
• roundtable discussion about education, training and career opportunities in the maritime field with guest Captain Bob Glover, director of education at Northeast Maritime Institute;
• our Internet Ports of Call;
• some holiday music from the Podsafe Music Network.

Please subscribe via iTunes or download the MP3. (Windows users can right click here and save the file on your computer. You can then open it in Windows Media Player, iTunes and other media players.)

For the show notes and links and to offer feedback, please visit the Messing About In Ships blog.

 

 MAIS Maritime Podcast Episode #3: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We received an email pointing us to the SFist’s skepticism regarding the Cosco Buson AIS plot and this caused us to do some investigation. The results we found are disconcerting and pertain to vessels making sharp turns. To clarify we have no idea if this problem existed on the Cosco Busan but I want to bring this up to our Professional Mariner readers as we think it’s important.

The Nautical Institutes AIS error reports webpage tells us;

I have observed too many vessels with wrong data transmitted by their AIS. Mostly headings are not correct, but the main problem - is offset correction given by GPS. If GPS has offset correction (set by navigator on bridge) then AIS transmits wrong vessel’s position (equal to offset).

You can watch now on ECDIS some vessel in the harbour is not alongside the berth but e.g. stays in the middle of harbour instead. The greater offset - the greater error. Some of the vessels have offset from 0.02 up to 0.3 nautical mile, and if you meet such vessel in Singapore Strait - then AIS information maybe very dangerous, as you can mistake such target with others.

I like AIS information very much, but when I watch such a picture on ECDIS - I would like to suggest to all navigators not to use on their GPS any offset. Nowadays GPS is reliable information and better to plot position on sea chart manually using satellite-derived calculation instead of inserted offset into GPS unit.

Lesson Learned: check the GPS offsets on your ship and assure you are sending accurate data… or you could confuse surrounding ships.