Rigs to Rocket Pads
3rd September 2020 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
If the coronavirus has highlighted anything about the economy of South Louisiana in general, and New Orleans in particular, the need to diversify our workforce away from oil and gas and hospitality and tourism has never been more clear.
Forty percent of the workforce of New Orleans has suffered unemployment at some juncture since the beginning of March. Collapsing oil prices merged with the COVID-19 quarantine has rendered hotels nearly abandoned, displaying the weakness of our dual industries. Petrochemicals and holiday-makers will prove a major part of our economy for years to come, yet Louisiana needs to accentuate and build upon an existing infrastructure – and expand it into a world-class industry.
Former Regions Bank President Scott Howard suggested in a recent op-ed in the daily paper that biotech could prove the answer for our economy. A sizable medical district already exists in New Orleans, anchored by two medical schools and related university research hospitals. Complexes dedicated to curing cancer and infectious diseases already rise near Claiborne Ave.
The Louisiana Legislature could double down on investment there and in other areas of the state blessed with a medical school infrastructure (such as Shreveport), and match those dollars with a free market incentive for innovative startup companies and existing research groups. The current state digital media tax credit easily could be adapted to biotech, applying a 25 percent tax credit on qualified payroll for in-state labor and 18 percent for qualified expenditures for software and video development to medical research. With no cap and no minimum requirement, such a tax credit could be used to offset any state income tax liability, with the state refunding any overages. Perhaps even more interesting to biotech venture capitalists, the media credit also allows 85 percent of the value earned as a rebate any time during the year, which could be sold on the open market to garner cash for a biotech startup.
The challenge of a biotech corridor, or series of them, is that such a plan does not provide an answer for the thousands of unemployed maritime workers along Louisiana’s coast accustomed to servicing the Gulf offshore oil infrastructure. Fortunately, a means exists to re-purpose the offshore rigs to serve an entirely different industry, and much of Louisiana’s boat and helicopter terminals would prove invaluable in such an effort.
As unbelievable as this sounds, one answer may be to turn oil rigs into rocket-launching platforms. Sounds like science fiction? Definitely not, thanks to Elon Musk.
The SpaceX pioneer has suggested that the hundreds of rockets that he plans to launch in the next five years should lift-off from waterborne platforms, no further north than the same parallel as Cape Canaveral. Out at sea, there is no danger of explosion or misfire affecting people. Moreover, the first stage of his Falcon rockets return to their launch point to be reused, so the waterborne platform must be incredibly stable.
This is the definition of an oil rig. Hundreds of oil rigs are sitting unused in the Gulf of Mexico. Their owners have only the responsibility to plug the underwater well. Other than forming coral reefs, the over-engineered structures have no purpose other than to sit as navigational hazards.
What if Louisiana were to adopt a variation on the historic restoration tax credits which would apply to oil rigs offshore? The credits would adapt them into launch platforms, and another variation on the digital media tax credits could help underwrite employment to set up and maintain those launch platforms. Offshore service companies which have sat idle since the crash in oil prices would have another potential market.
All of Elon Musk’s Falcon rockets and production facilities are in Texas, after all. They could be trans-pipped via the Houston ship canal to the platforms, sparing them the hundreds-mile-long journey to Cape Canaveral or to the Atlantic. And like the SpaceX founder’s first stage, oil rigs can be reused time and again. They are built to withstand a hurricane.
Moreover, Musk is planning a major expansion of his rocket launch needs in the coming months. He aims to put most of the world’s cell phone companies out of business, launching 120 Starlink satellites per month.
Starlink stands as SpaceX’s ambitious plan to build an interconnected network of about 12,000 small satellites, to beam high-speed internet from orbit to anywhere in the world. The company has so far launched nearly 600 Starlink satellites and currently is constructing a system of ground stations and user terminals, to connect consumers directly to its network.
One struggles to contextualize what SpaceX’s satellite production rate means given the difference in size and complexity of spacecraft built by other companies. But Quilty Analytics founder Chris Quilty told CNBC that Starlink manufacturing occurs at a speed never before seen in the satellite sector. “To put it in perspective, Iridium, which previously held the record for the largest commercial satellite constellation, was manufacturing satellites at the rate of about six satellites per month at the peak of production,” Quilty said.
On the customer side, SpaceX recently informed the FCC that it is already seeing “extraordinary demand” from people interested in Starlink’s internet service. The company claimed “nearly 700,000 individuals” across the United States were interested in the service, causing SpaceX to request that the FCC increase the number of authorized user terminals to five million from one million.
“At 60 satellites per Falcon 9, SpaceX is also driven to bring its Starship launch vehicle online as soon as it can, as the company says each will be able to carry 400 Starlink satellites at a time,” Bryce’s senior space analyst Phil Smith told CNBC. That’s a huge market, and a huge need for launch platforms.
However, there’s an even greater need for rocket launch platforms closer to home. The Michoud facility in eastern New Orleans remains NASA’s main rocket assembly facility, particularly for the Artemis missions that will carry astronauts to the Moon and Mars. The quarter-mile-long building is the only single room under one roof where aerospace engineers can take rocket hardware from one end to the other on a crane without ever having to set it down. It’s the size of 31 football fields. It once assembled the massive Saturn V and now brings together the 212 ft SLS core stages. NASA calls Michoud ‘America’s Rocket Factory.’
New Orleans has one other advantage beyond hosting the main rocket assembly facility in the world. Michoud enjoys water access right next to the assembly center. In fact, that’s why the facility was built in eastern New Orleans in the first place.
“You can’t transport rockets this large on highways,” Byron Williams, a logistics engineering manager who graduated from Xavier University, told the daily paper. He is responsible for the team that transports large equipment on NASA’s Pegasus barge to NASA sites such as the Stennis Space Center for testing, or Kennedy for launches. “One of MAF’s biggest advantages is that it sits beside deep water.”
Imagine being able to float huge rockets directly to their launch stations in the Gulf, just offshore. A multi-week journey to Florida’s Atlantic coast would be reduced to mere hours. Rigs off Louisiana’s coast, with the service infrastructure here, could make the Pelican State the center of near-earth orbital activity, and beyond. It would only take the Louisiana legislature to make a few tweaks in our tax law for such a destiny to come to pass.
This article originally published in the August 31, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
