It's not as rare as you might think. All sun-synchronous orbits are slightly retrograde (inclination = 98 degrees or so at 600 km) in order to take advantage of

It's not as rare as you might think. All sun-synchronous orbits are slightly retrograde (inclination = 98 degrees or so at 600 km) in order to take advantage of the precession caused by the earth's equatorial bulge and maintain the same local solar time in the ground track. Also, Israel always launches in a retrograde orbit, since they have neighbors to the east who would react too well to what looks for all intents and purposes like a missile launch, or to expended rocket stages dropped on their heads. For that reason, Israel launches retrograde over the Mediterranean. Even neglecting a retrograde orbit, though, just a slight difference in inclination is enough to totally ruin your day. Even if you're only off by one degree, if you're travelling at 7.8 km/s your closing perpendicular velocity at the node crossing is 7800*sin(1 degree) = 136 m/s. That's almost 500 km/h, plenty fast enough to ruin your day.