According to the recent reports, the SpaceX project owned by Elon Musk has recently made an interesting acquisition. The SpaceX project has revealed that it had acquired two deepwater oil rigs towards the end of last year.
SpaceX will be converting these two former oil rigs into launchpads that will be floating in the middle of the sea. The company is currently in the process of developing enormous Starship rockets. It is planned that these Starship rockets will be launched through these floating launchpads.
It has been confirmed that the rigs are deployed at the Port of Brownsville. The reason why SpaceX has acquired the rigs is that they are located close to the Starship development facility for SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas.
After the acquisition of the former oil rigs, SpaceX has changed their names to Phobos and Deimos respectively. People who are familiar with astronomy and are interested in planets would know that these rigs have been named after the moons of the planet Mars.
According to Elon Musk, Starship is a really big rocket that is being designed and built by the SpaceX project. The rocket is being built to have a huge space for cargo and must be able to accommodate at least 100 passengers. The purpose of this Starship is to have people make to and fro travels to Mars and the moon.
The team of scientists and developers at SpaceX has confirmed that building the Spaceship rocket is on top of their priority list. SpaceX has already conducted a successful test run of the Spaceship rocket prototype and achieved its highest altitude. According to reports, the successful testing of the prototype was conducted back in December of 2020.
During the testing, the prototype of the Starship rocket managed to achieve the 40,000 feet altitude. Furthermore, the rocket also completed many objectives and tests that were involved in the testing mode. Although the rocket exploded at the end of its landing, yet SpaceX confirmed that the testing that they aimed to conduct was successful.
As per the public records, it has been confirmed that the former oil rigs labeled 8500 & 8501 had been purchased by SpaceX for a whopping $3.5 million. It has been revealed that the Valaris oil rigs that SpaceX has acquired are ultra-deepwater semi-submersible oil rigs.
Valaris was the largest owner in the world for the offshore oil rigs and its headquarters were based in Houston, Texas. It was back on August 11 when Valaris ended up filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was confirmed that the company was under a lot of debt load and the only way for the company to shed it off was to file for bankruptcy.