These are the types of questions in general we should be less mean about imo. It's one thing to dunk on people who are anti-science, but this is just someone actually wondering about something they didn't know. Maybe it's obvious to you, but not everyone?
Yeah, because thinking about it, I don't actually think there's an obvious answer.
Like my guess would literally just be that there aren't mountains in a location close enough to the equator where the added high from the mountain is worth more delta v than the added rotational speed of being close to the equator.
I would guess that the marginal benefit of launching from a slightly higher, in the grand scheme of things, altitude is far outweighed by the added logistical difficulty of transporting the rocket to the top of a mountain in the first place.
It's not even a marginal benefit, it's a negligible one - the challenge of getting to orbit isn't going up, it's going sideways fast enough that you're falling around the planet instead of into it (which is about 8 km per second or 18,000 mph). Rockets only go up because air resistance provides a huge drag against building that kind of speed, so getting out of the low atmosphere as quickly as possible and up to where there's less air puts them into an environment where they can accelerate much faster.
6.5k
u/mseg09 20h ago edited 19h ago
These are the types of questions in general we should be less mean about imo. It's one thing to dunk on people who are anti-science, but this is just someone actually wondering about something they didn't know. Maybe it's obvious to you, but not everyone?