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