@Meowingkitty wrote:
I can't say I'm surprised. Why on earth would you put Cape Canaveral in a state surrounded by water and has clouds, hurricanes and lots of inclement weather? Why didn't they put it in Utah, New Mexico, Arizona where the weather is pretty predictable. I remember this happening almost every time they try to launch something.
@Meowingkitty Your question got me curious.
From Scientific American:
We contacted space historian Roger Launius, a senior curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, to find out why NASA settled on lifting off from the Cape.
Why do we launch space shuttles from a place where the weather is such a constant source of trouble?
Well, is there any place where the weather is not an issue? You do it in the middle of the country and you get Tornado Alley. You do it in the South and you get hurricanes. On and on and on. There are always those issues.
Florida was chosen for several major reasons. One was, it's close to the equator. The linear velocity of Earth's surface is greatest at the equator, much as a ceiling fan blade slices through the air faster at its tip than at its center hub, conferring a fuel-saving boost to spacecraft attempting to escape Earth's gravity.
The second reason was it had to be on the east coast, over the ocean, so you wouldn't fly over people that might get killed as stuff dropped off or blew up.
And the location that they chose in Florida had a lot to do with the fact that there wasn't anything there. You go there today and you don't see it, but Brevard County in the 1940s was a bunch of orchards and hardly anything else. And this island that they're on [Merritt Island] had good logistics, because there was a navy base and an army base not too far away. But there was no population density whatsoever. It was just a beach, essentially.
You mention that it had to be on the east coast so the launch would climb over the ocean. Why do launches have to go east rather than, say, west from California?
When you launch headed east, you gain the rotation of the Earth in terms of acceleration. And so you don't have to have quite as powerful a rocket.
And that's a benefit related to the one conferred by being close to the equator.
That's right. The best place to launch is the spaceport that the European Space Agency has in French Guiana [five degrees north of the equator].
So why not launch from a U.S. territory that's even closer to the equator, such as Hawaii or Puerto Rico?
I think NASA viewed those as too far removed.
You mentioned Russia's launch site in Kazakhstan. How are they able to lift off from such a high latitude?
Well, they've got a big rocket. You have to have a larger booster that can muscle you into orbit.
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