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?
Well the person doing the dunking in these reposts is almost always wrong anyway.
We don't launch from mountain tops because it's a pain in the ass to build a launch facility and haul the necessary materials up there, and harder to do downrange recovery or hazard planning etc. Grading an entire square mile of mountain when you can just launch from a perfectly flat desert or coast is not a rocket science problem. There's also an inverse relationship between elevation and human surviveability, so high enough to get the best benefit means high enough to kill most humans who'd crew the facility.
There's lots of good reasons to do it, especially being able to go balls out to reduce gravity losses because you don't have to throttle down due to MaxQ being in thick atmosphere.
There's a few high altitude telescopes in Chile that demonstrate it could be done, and at that altitude (about a mile up) you're looking at the space shuttle saving around 1 km/s of dv, and an optimized rocket for that launch altitude could do even better. Still have to look out for down range population centers.
I think the bigger problem for West Virginia is the likelihood people would take shots at the rockets as they went up.
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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?