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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a country with inconvenient geography. You really want to launch rockets close to the equator to save fuel, and ideally you want to launch on a path that doesn't drop debris (from spent stages or potential failures) on inhabited areas or foreign nations. Few such sites exist, but if you launch from an airplane you can just fly to a convenient location somewhere in international waters

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Why wouldn't they just ship their payload to one of the existing launch providers? And save the money?

As an example, Russia's launch sites are all suboptimal. Baikanur is at about the latitude of Quebec (not exactly the equator), the launch path is over land, and it's in Kazakhstan instead of in Russia. They recently opened Vostochny on the Russian East coast which improves two of those points, at the cost of being even further north.

For most things, including servicing the ISS, it's perfectly adequate, and for satellites that go into polar orbits it doesn't matter, but some orbits are hard to reach from those launch sites because of the inclination. In the past Russia has used ESA's launch site in French Guiana for those, but that's not an option for them right now.

Indian launch sites are pretty close to the equator however, and shipping even secret military payloads to India for launching is feasible. Since there's already sharing of some sensitive military secrets between New Delhi and Moscow.

If it was 10x the cost per kg then maybe Russia would look into alternative systems, but I imagine 2x or 3x the market rate would secure an unlimited number of launch slots.

So there's no point to launching from a plane.

Geostrategic considerations might make it impossible to use a foreign launch site.

No country that I know of is currently, or has ever been, on bad terms with all launching countries simultaneously. Do you have any examples?

When you have business in space, having independent launch capabilities is a strategic matter, whatever your relationships with your partner countries are. E.g. Europe wants to keep access to space without having to rely solely on the United States.

How is that relevant to the parent point?

> I wonder if a country without an orbital rocket program would consider buying them out.

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