CASE 35 A Sea Launch Recovery?
CIRCA 2008
Sea Launch engineers say the three-week round-trip journey across the Pacific Ocean is the most rewarding part of their jobs.
The cruise is the culmination of nearly two months of work preparing the rocket, payload, and launch teams for the mission.
Prior to operations at Home Port, about 18 months goes into the planning, flight design, and logistics. “It’s really nice to know most of the reviews are over and we’re finally ready to launch,” said Bill Rujevcan, mission director for the company’s next flight. More than 300 people take the trip to the company’s equatorial launch site about 1,400 miles south of Hawaii. The crew includes workers from several nations, including: Ukraine, Russia, Norway, the Philippines, and the United States. Ukraine-based Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash build the Zenit 3SL rocket’s first and second stages, while Energia of Russia manufactures the Block DM-SL upper stage for the rocket. Norwegian ship officers manage marine operations, and Filipino deckhands work on both the Sea Launch Commander and the Odyssey launch platform. U.S. employees from the Boeing Co. fill management roles and provide the flight design, payload fairing, and satellite adapter. Astrotech, a contractor, oversees processing of customer payloads inside a clean room at the company’s Payload Processing Facility at Home Port in Long
Beach, California.
After 27 missions in nine years of business, Sea Launch is thriving in the do-or-die commercial launch industry. The company’s Zenit 3SL rocket has suffered three setbacks in that time.
Two were total failures. The rocket’s success rate places it among the top tier of heavy-lift launchers on the commercial market, and the company’s launch backlog seems to confirm that. Sea Launch

is already booking payloads for launch in the future. Next year is sold out, according to