They Built an Offshore Launchpad From Scratch. The Regulator Just Signed Off.
Offshore launch has had two models: the converted barge, and the idea of a purpose-built platform. Seagate Space just moved from the second category from concept to cleared.
On December 4, 2025, the American Bureau of Shipping granted Seagate Space Approval in Principle for its Gateway-S platform, the first offshore asset to receive AIP under the ABS Requirements for Offshore Spaceports, published in 2023. Seagate cleared the standard first.
On April 6, 2026, Seagate signed a memorandum of understanding with Firefly Aerospace to collaborate on integrating the Gateway-S with Firefly's Alpha rocket, per SpaceNews. The MOU gives the platform a named customer and a launch vehicle to design around. No contract value, no launch date, no deployment schedule.
The design distinction is the structural argument. Most existing offshore launch assets are converted vessels. Seagate built the Gateway-S from scratch as a modular semi-submersible with container-sized components that can be transported by sea, truck, or rail and reassembled at different sites. The modularity is the commercial bet: move the platform to where the launch customer is rather than building fixed coastal infrastructure.
The platform was tested at the MIT Sea Grant Hydrodynamics Laboratory, where a scale model was run through conditions simulating ocean stability requirements for orbital launch from a semi-submersible. The hydrodynamics data was used to validate the hull form and DP station-keeping performance. ABS reviewed the results as part of the AIP process.
Firefly Alpha is a logical pairing. The rocket has been flying from Vandenberg and other sites; offshore launch expands geographic flexibility and reduces range coordination constraints. Firefly has stated publicly it wants mobile launch capability for responsive deployment. The MOU formalizes that intent.
Firefly's financials are real: $159.9 million in 2025 revenue, up 163% year-over-year, per SEC filings. The company returned Alpha to flight on March 11, 2026 following an earlier failure, carrying 1,170 kilograms to LEO or 745 kilograms to SSO at $15 million per launch. The rocket works. Whether a purpose-built offshore platform can be built and deployed profitably is a different question.
The offshore recovery market has grown from 2 missions in 2015 to over 100 in 2024, per industry data. That growth is the market signal Seagate is betting on: if launch activity offshore is expanding, a purpose-built platform has customers. If it is not, the capital costs do not recover.
Seagate has raised at least $1.5 million in documented funding from Tim Draper and an earlier New World Angels investment, per Tampa Bay Business Journal reporting. Platform construction and deployment costs orders of magnitude more. The gap between what Seagate has raised and what the platform costs to build is the central problem the company has not solved publicly.
The ABS AIP is the durable story. Standards work outlast individual MOUs. Seagate spent engineering time and capital getting a semi-submersible platform through a classification society review process that did not exist in this form two years ago. Anyone building offshore launch infrastructure now has a reference point: this is what the standard looks like, and Seagate already cleared it.
The MOU is preliminary. The AIP is not.
