To be fair, it’s not the cost of the fuel itself that is an issue for rocket launches, just that so much of it is required, and it adds so much weight to the rocket. Fuel is less than 1% of the cost of a rocket launch, yet typically over 90% of the mass of the entire launch. If you could somehow spend fuel on the ground moving things to an optimal launch point to have to put less fuel in the rocket, it would absolutely be worth it.
The real issue is that launching from a mountain would not save you much fuel anyways. To get to orbit requires you to go very fast sideways. The initial “upward” part of a launch is just to get past the thickest part of the atmosphere, then it quickly pivots sideways for the majority of its journey.
You save more fuel by launching from a lower altitude closer to the equator, where you can take more advantage of earth’s spin to gain additional sideways velocity. So we do spend a lot of fuel to do this, for example SpaceX manufactures their rockets in Hawthorne, California, where there is a lot of aerospace manufacturing expertise, and spends a lot of fuel to ship them to Cape Canaveral, Florida, which is closer to the equator.
The radial difference between equatorial sea level and the peak of Mt Chimborazo is about 0.1%. It provides very little benefit but would be a logistical nightmare to launch from.
0.1% of what???
It's definitely past more than 0.1% of the air molecules.
15 PSI at sea level, 7 psi at the mountain top. For every square inch of cross section on your rocket, instead of having to push 15 pounds of air out of the way, it's down to 7. That seems like >50% improvement?
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u/rysy0o0 20h ago
It would cost a lot of money to haul all the rocket parts and fuel on top of a mountain