A decade ago, Russian airline group S7 bet on a floating spaceport to break into the commercial launch market. Yet Sea Launch hasn’t launched a rocket in more than 12 years.

On September 27, 2016, exactly 10 years ago, S7 struck one of the most ambitious deals in Russian spaceflight: the purchase of Sea Launch, a floating spaceport designed to send commercial payloads into space from the Pacific Ocean. S7 Group had ambitious plans to capture the commercial launch market, and its CEO, Vladislav Filyov, drew comparisons to Elon Musk. Science communicator Vitaly Yegorov explains what became of the project over the next decade and how the war affected its fate.

One project captures much of what went right and wrong in Russian spaceflight after the Soviet Union collapsed. Engineers from Russia and Ukraine built it from the remnants of the Soviet space program, with help from the United States and Norway. It saw successful launches and devastating accidents, lost out to commercial rivals, and fell victim to a political rift between former allies.

That project is Sea Launch, a floating spaceport for launching commercial satellites from equatorial waters in the Pacific Ocean. It now sits idle at a dock in Russia’s Primorye region, with no future in sight.

In the 1990s, Russia’s space industry was struggling to survive. State funding had fallen sharply, and the companies that had recently built the remarkable Energia rocket and Buran spacecraft had to scramble for money to pay their employees and keep their factories running. The international commercial market offered a lifeline. The United States and Europe needed relatively inexpensive launches, while Russian and Ukrainian companies needed foreign contracts. The U.S. interest was not purely economic; it also wanted former Soviet rocket technology to remain with those who already had it and not spread to countries Washington sought to keep it from.

Joint programs followed that would have seemed unthinkable just 10 years earlier. American space shuttles began flying to the Mir space station, Russian rocket engines went to the U.S., and Russian space companies formed joint ventures with European and American firms. One was the international Sea Launch consortium, established in 1995.

The engineering logic was elegant: put a spaceport on a vessel and take it to the most energy-efficient place to launch rockets. The equator is particularly well suited to launching commercial telecommunications satellites into geostationary orbit. There, Earth’s rotation gives a rocket up to 465 meters per second of extra speed at liftoff. More important, an equatorial launch avoids the need to adjust the orbit’s inclination relative to the equator. Together, these advantages increase a rocket’s payload capacity by about a quarter — a kind of gift from the planet. There is another benefit: in the middle of the Pacific, falling rocket stages pose less of a concern, reducing disposal costs.

The project began with a used, Japanese-built semi-submersible oil platform called Ocean Odyssey. It was converted for space launches and renamed Odyssey. The platform carried rockets to the launch site and served as the launchpad.

The second part of Sea Launch was Sea Launch Commander, an assembly and command ship built for the project. Rockets underwent final assembly and launch preparations aboard the ship while it was still in port. During a launch, the ship served as mission control and a tracking and command station. The original plan was to carry rockets to the launch site aboard Sea Launch Commander and transfer them to Odyssey at sea, allowing more than one launch per voyage. But the vessels’ motion at sea forced the consortium to abandon the idea.

The vessels were based in Long Beach, California, near Los Angeles. From there, they sailed to the equator, where the platform took up its launch position and the rocket was prepared for liftoff. The command ship then withdrew to a safe distance with all personnel aboard.

Boeing was the U.S. partner in the project, with a 40% stake. It handled overall management, financing, and commercial operations. On the technical side, Boeing was responsible for the rocket’s fairing and for preparing its payload section, allowing the project to comply with U.S. technology nonproliferation requirements. Personnel from Russia and Ukraine had almost no knowledge of what was beneath the fairing and had no contact with the payload. Russia’s RSC Energia developed the launch infrastructure and received a 25% stake. Norway’s Kvaerner received 20% for converting Odyssey and building the command ship. Ukraine’s Yuzhmash and Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, which worked on the rocket, received 10% and 5%, respectively.

The consortium chose the medium-lift Zenit-3SL rocket, derived from the Soviet Zenit-2. From the equator, it could launch satellites that would have required heavy-lift rockets from Baikonur or Cape Canaveral. Its first two stages were made by Ukraine’s Yuzhmash but contained many Russian components, including the RD-171 first-stage engine. Russia’s Energia also supplied the DM-SL upper stage — effectively the rocket’s third stage. Building the complete rocket therefore required contributions from three countries.

The first demonstration launch took place in 1999, followed by the first commercial launch. Sea Launch was in business, but it soon became clear that its finances were falling short of expectations.

Investment in Sea Launch totaled about $3.5 billion. In the 1990s, as the telecommunications market grew and Europe’s Ariane 4 was its only launch competitor, investors saw promise in the project. By the early 2000s, however, Russia’s heavy-lift Proton rockets, Europe’s Ariane 5, and the American Atlas V and Delta IV had entered the international market. Sea Launch struggled to attract orders, and its inability to launch several rockets on a single voyage erased the economic advantage of launching from the equator.

Zenit also proved far from the most reliable rocket. In 2000, a software error cost the project the ICO F-1 satellite. In 2004, Telstar 18 was delivered to an off-target orbit, though one that could be corrected. Then, on January 30, 2007, Sea Launch suffered its most dramatic accident. The rocket carrying the NSS-8 satellite exploded almost immediately after its engines ignited, engulfing the launchpad in a huge fireball. The platform needed repairs, though they were less extensive than the explosion had initially suggested. The year of downtime during those repairs dealt a much greater blow to the project’s finances.

In June 2009, Sea Launch declared bankruptcy.

In 2010, RSC Energia’s head, Vitaly Lopota, effectively decided on his own to save Sea Launch, and the Russian company took the lead in restructuring it. Through its subsidiary Energia Overseas, it gained control of 95% of Sea Launch’s shares. Boeing retained 3%, and the Norwegian side retained 2%. Bankruptcy, however, did not wipe out the old debts. Along with the spaceport, RSC Energia inherited a multimillion-dollar legal dispute with Boeing.

For Lopota, the effort to save Sea Launch ended in criminal prosecution. In 2014, investigators began examining RSC Energia’s financial transactions connected to the project. They believed the corporation’s management had signed deals that made little financial sense and spent substantial sums propping up a money-losing business. Lopota was convinced he had saved a unique project. In July 2025, the criminal case against him was closed because the statute of limitations had expired, after he agreed to end the proceedings on those grounds. It was not an acquittal, but neither did any court find him guilty.

Taking over the spaceport also meant that the Russian side had to pay to keep it running and remain responsible for Sea Launch’s existing financial obligations.

From 2011 through 2014, Sea Launch carried out six more launches, one of which again ended in failure. Over the project’s 15-year history, it conducted 36 launches: 32 successful, one partially successful, and three failures. SpaceX had emerged as another competitor by then, but Sea Launch was already facing a different set of problems.

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, and Moscow’s relations with Kyiv and Western countries deteriorated sharply. For Russia’s space industry, that meant sanctions and the collapse of cooperation with Ukraine on Zenit and other projects. Sea Launch was left with no orders, no rocket, debts to Boeing, and about $20 million per year in costs to maintain its U.S. infrastructure.

For a while, the project’s future was uncertain. There was talk of selling it to Israel or the United Arab Emirates, but in 2016, the possibility of a revival emerged from Russia’s private space sector. By then, Sea Launch was an asset of RSC Energia, part of the recently formed state corporation Roscosmos. The debt to Boeing for Sea Launch stood at about $373.5 million. Meanwhile, NASA was stuck: after the shuttle program ended in 2011, American astronauts could reach the International Space Station only aboard Russian spacecraft. After 2014, the prices NASA paid for seats began to rise, while American private companies had not yet completed spacecraft to replace the Russian ones.

Under a multilateral agreement, Boeing obtained rights to five seats aboard Russian crewed Soyuz spacecraft and then offered them to NASA. The bulk of the debt associated with Sea Launch was paid off, and Roscosmos was finally able to find a new investor for the floating spaceport.

In 2016, Vladislav Filyov, co-owner of the major Russian airline S7 Group, decided to try his hand at the space business. S7 Group finalized the deal in April 2018. The company acquired the Odyssey platform, the assembly-and-command ship, equipment, and the rights to the Sea Launch trademark.

S7 was counting on Roscosmos’s new Soyuz-5 rocket. It was effectively a Zenit redesigned to use Russian-made parts and carry heavier payloads. For launches from the equator, its projected performance and price were comparable to those of its main rival, the expendable 2015 version of the Falcon 9.

Filyov’s plans were ambitious: S7 was prepared to order 80 rockets from Roscosmos at once. While Soyuz-5 was still in development, S7 ordered 12 Zenit rockets from Ukraine’s Yuzhmash. Building them, however, required Russian components, whose delivery depended on permits from the Russian authorities.

For a time, it seemed that S7’s status as a private company might allow it to work around the political disputes between Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S. There was even a proposal to assemble the rocket from major components in the port of Long Beach, where the floating spaceport was still based. The “American” Antares was being built in the U.S. at the time in much the same way, using a Ukrainian rocket body and Russian engines, so the idea did not seem far-fetched. But the Russian authorities’ determination to deny Ukraine orders ruled out that option for Zenit. Filyov was left waiting for the delayed Soyuz-5.

In 2020, S7 moved Sea Launch from the U.S. to Russia to cut maintenance costs and avoid further political risks as relations between the countries worsened. The move came at a steep price: some of the American and Ukrainian equipment had to be removed, leaving the spaceport almost inoperable even if Zenit rockets became available again.

At the same time, S7 faced two crises. Vladislav Filyov’s wife, Natalya Filyova, who was also a co-owner of the company, died in 2019; then the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic hit the airline in 2020. S7 had little capacity left to pursue its space ambitions, and 2022 effectively ended all of Sea Launch’s commercial prospects. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought a new wave of sanctions against its space industry, virtually shutting Russian rockets out of international competition.

Soyuz-5 did not make its first test launch from Baikonur until 2026, but that made no difference to Sea Launch. Even before the war, the cost of adapting the launchpad for the new rocket was estimated at $1 billion. Under current sanctions, the investment looks economically hopeless. What is more, the growth of low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations has diminished Sea Launch’s old advantage — launching from the equator — because those satellites instead need orbits closer to the poles.

As of September 2026, Sea Launch remains in the port of Slavyanka near Vladivostok. It has gone more than 12 years without a launch. The mothballed spaceport has yet to be scrapped, but a return to launches looks remote.

Perhaps Sea Launch’s only chance of revival today lies with Rassvet, a satellite internet project by the Russian company Bureau 1440. Competing projects Starlink and Amazon Leo are pursuing vertical integration, producing not only satellites but also rockets and launch facilities through SpaceX and Blue Origin. Bureau 1440 might be interested in launching satellites from a spaceport of its own, one beyond the reach of Ukrainian missiles. But that would take several more years and depend on many other factors — above all, the war.