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, and its CEO, Vladislav Filyov, drew comparisons to Elon Musk. Science communicator Vitaly Yegorov explains what became of the project over the next decade and how the war affected its fate.