Sea Launch

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When Robert Heinlein famously said that Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere in the solar system, he was speaking more of the difficulty of permanently leaving the surface of the Earth than of the ease of voyaging across interplanetary space. Even the lowest-energy stable geocentric orbits require speed beyond easy comprehension, something Randall Munroe discussed on his indispensable "What if?" blog a few weeks ago. For this reason rocket makers have sought every assistance imaginable in bootstrapping their way toward space, and if at all possible launch eastward to gain a little nudge from the rotation of the Earth. Since launch sites closer to the equator maximize this boost, and also reduce the need for expensive plane change maneuvers in orbit, a consortium of Ukrainian, Russian, Norwegian, and American companies thought "Why not simplify matters by towing the launch site into the middle of the ocean?" You can read more about their joint venture here:
Sea Launch

Sea Launch does exactly what you'd expect form it's name. The rocket (a Zenit 3-SL, an amalgam of former Soviet stages perfected by decades of sending reconnaissance spacecraft to spy on America's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction) launches from the sea, more specifically from a patch of remote Pacific Ocean far from shipping lanes and inhabited shorelines so the system can set its own schedule without concern for competition from rival launch services for range time or raids from pirates. Since most of the spacecraft carried by Sea Launch are bound for geostationary orbits, a launch site on the equator allows it to reach a pinpoint-accurate circular orbit with no inclination to the equator more easily and efficiently than rockets can from anywhere else in the world. The tradeoff is the need to operate two large ships and a three-stage launch vehicle far from civilization and a long lonely trip from any resupply, but the trade has proved sufficiently sweet to fetch 35 launches so far. Sometimes complicated ideas make life simpler in rocket science.

Sea Launch is based on rugged Cold War-era technology, but three of its launches have failed so far, two spectacularly. In 2007 one of the turbopumps on the first stage ingested a piece of debris not cleared from the propellant tanks during production, shutting the vehicle's propulsion system down a few seconds after launch. If nothing else, the failure validated Sea Launch's two-ship philosophy that evacuates everyone from the launch platform to an independent command ship just before departure:

Earlier this year, another Sea Launch Zenit failed in first stage flight, this time apparently due to faulty guidance:

Venturing into the cosmic ocean remains a difficult enterprise even today, more than half a century after the first human explorers ventured there, and even with a strong profit motive from the commercial telecom industry. Sea Launch shows that our ability to work here is growing in fits and starts, not monotonically, but at least we're growing. That humans do such baroque things, and actually seem to be reasonably successful at it most of the time, never ceases to amaze me.