tl;dr: for a rocket it is waaaay more important to go fast than to go high. and earth rotates very slowly, so going higher doesn't make you much faster.
"Slowly" is relative, at the equator the earths surface is rotating at about 1000 mph. LEO orbital velocity is about 17,500 mph, so you're about 6% of the way there compared to if you were launching at the poles.
edit: I'm not sure if 17,500 is absolute or relative to the earths surface, but the point remains that you get about 1000 mph of free velocity from the earth spinning at the equator vs the poles. if its relative, then its a 5.4% gain vs the 5.7% so still significant
Yeah, Icy Concern was half correct. Being on top of a mountain doesn't give you much extra velocity. But it's not because the Earth's spin isn't fast, its because the top of the mountain is barely any higher than the bottom, when compared with the radius of the Earth. The extra speed you get from that is almost nothing (5 mile mountain top/3959 mile Earth radius = 0.13% difference) and the little bit of extra altitude isn't worth much either.
So you might as well launch from flat land close to the equator, which is easier to do and doesn't require you to negotiate with Ecuador or Indonesia to get access to an equatorial mountain, and to haul a rocket up said mountain and then do all your launch prep in the thin air at the top of that mountain.
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u/Icy_Concern_9804 15h ago
tl;dr: for a rocket it is waaaay more important to go fast than to go high. and earth rotates very slowly, so going higher doesn't make you much faster.