3 ms·

Could that change in the future, assuming reliability improvements? Though, thinking about it a bit more I don’t really see why you’d want to launch eastbound o

Could that change in the future, assuming reliability improvements? Though, thinking about it a bit more I don’t really see why you’d want to launch eastbound out of Vandenberg. Not sure what you’d gain.

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walrus01 8y ago
Vandernberg is generally used for highly inclined orbits or polar orbit launches. The earth's rotation is used to assist eastbound launches for equatorial/geostationary, so eastbound is preferred. Such as most of the launches from Florida and Wallops. One of the weird bits of space trivia is that Israel's domestic rocket and satellite launch program makes the sacrifice of less efficient launches and less total delta-v in the first and second stages, by launching westbound over the ocean, because they really do not want to launch what is almost indistinguishable from a ballistic missile eastbound over their angry neighbors. Pretty much the only place in the world where low-inclination launches occur westbound.
Rebelgecko 8y ago
Probably not. As their volume increases, even if their launches have a _really good_ success rate of 99.9% [1], catastrophic failure would still be frequent enough that you don't want to live under their flight path[2]. Even if they have a 100% success rate from here on out, there would still be issues with things like blowing out people's windows. [1] They're at around 95% now, although gradually improving. Switching to a drastically different launch vehicle like the BFR will probably bring those numbers down, at least initially [2] see https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882600/china-long-march-3b-rocket-booster-crash-xiangdu-guangxi https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882600/china-long-march..., or any of the cases where rockets killed people on the ground
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garmaine 8y ago
Rotational speed of the Earth.

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walrus01 8y ago

Vandernberg is generally used for highly inclined orbits or polar orbit launches. The earth's rotation is used to assist eastbound launches for equatorial/geostationary, so eastbound is preferred. Such as most of the launches from Florida and Wallops. One of the weird bits of space trivia is that Israel's domestic rocket and satellite launch program makes the sacrifice of less efficient launches and less total delta-v in the first and second stages, by launching westbound over the ocean, because they really do not want to launch what is almost indistinguishable from a ballistic missile eastbound over their angry neighbors. Pretty much the only place in the world where low-inclination launches occur westbound.

Rebelgecko 8y ago

Probably not. As their volume increases, even if their launches have a _really good_ success rate of 99.9% [1], catastrophic failure would still be frequent enough that you don't want to live under their flight path[2]. Even if they have a 100% success rate from here on out, there would still be issues with things like blowing out people's windows. [1] They're at around 95% now, although gradually improving. Switching to a drastically different launch vehicle like the BFR will probably bring those numbers down, at least initially [2] see https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882600/china-long-march-3b-rocket-booster-crash-xiangdu-guangxi https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882600/china-long-march..., or any of the cases where rockets killed people on the ground

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garmaine 8y ago

Rotational speed of the Earth.