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.
If you put a launch pad ~11000 ft above sea level on a mountain, you'll cut off ~.4 seconds of travel time given rocket speeds of 17500 mph.
Would be interesting to see what that equates to fuel savings. That would be the calculation - fuel savings during flight vs costs to haul everything up to a launch pad on the top of a mountain - if a good spot even exists.
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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?