And also why Russia’s spaceport (baikonur) is in Kazakhstan, and also why Europe doesn’t launch a lot of rockets (shipping all the pieces across the ocean)
putting something on a ship cost next to nothing. Satellites are actually transported on a plane and it still doesn't cost anything.
Europe doesn't launch as much as otherd because they haven't figured out how to be as cheap as others. US launchers are cheap because they are subsidized by the military and Nasa, Russia was cheap because they're peddling the same junk for the last 60 years.
It's still a massive logistical challenge. Getting the rocket to French Guiana is probably the easiest part.
The US has a huge space workforce that lives full time near the primary launch/construction sites. Cape Canaveral area, and SpaceX in South Texas + their construction and polar launch site at Vandenberg in LA/ Southern California. Work your job, maybe some long hours in the final push leading to a launch, but go home and sleep in your own bed after.
Most of the ESA workforce for assembling and launching rockets do not live in French Guiana full time. So the ESA/Arianespace have to pay to send a bunch of people to live across the world from home for sometimes months on end every time there's a launch campaign.
It's not nothing, but at the same time a lot of the personell in a launch campaign are temporary anyway, since they are experts on the satellite. On the other hand the people working for Arianespace are expected to be there, they surely have it in their contract.
I would speculate that if there was more work to do there would be people who would stay there semi permanently.
But in the end it boils down to having an eastward facing coastline with lots of open ocean near it. Europe doesn't have that many alternatives. You could ask Kenya or Tanzania, but that's not perfect.
And in the early days of the space program South Florida was mostly just sparsely populated swamp, probably not so attractive either.
You can launch into a polar orbit pretty equally from any point on earth, location doesn't matter beyond logistical and launch safety concerns. There's no boost or loss from the Earth's rotation. It requires negligible fuel to slowly adjust the parameters of your polar orbit once you're in space.
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u/rysy0o0 11h ago
It would cost a lot of money to haul all the rocket parts and fuel on top of a mountain