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Comment by idontwantthis | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX chose regulatory hard-mode when they put their launch pad right next to a wildlife preserve. I’m sure it had a lot of other benefits but they knew what they were getting into.

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Basically all land not near a population center is some sort of wildlife preserve. Every little piece of land on earth has its own unique [insert wildlife here] and you can always find some people that think preserving that thing is more important than almost anything else.

Everywhere in the US has either wildlife or somebody's beach house. If we want rockets, high-speed rail, or whatever some turtles are going to get killed.

Yeah, can anyone with know-how chime in on this? Why did they choose to do this instead of buying a bunch of desert in Nevada or something? I'm sure there are some very smart technical reasons but I have no clue.

Because it would require overland flight of populated areas. That would be even harder to get permission for - especially with a novel and experimental vehicle.

There’s a limited amount of sites available with an eastern shoreline. You can’t launch a prototype heavy launch vehicle over Salt Lake City (though China is notorious for this with their inland launch sites).

The closer to the equator, the better. Also ideally you have several hundred miles of open ocean eastward for crashes/retrievals/landings/etc.

That doesn’t leave a ton of options in the continental US - Florida and southern Texas.

I'm a bit surprised that Mexico, France (owner of French Guiana, the site of Arianespace launches), or other more equatorial countries haven't offered their coasts to SpaceX. Development could take place there, and government launches would take place at Canaveral and Vandenberg as planned.

Then again, the cost of shipping supplies and relocating people to a southern port would be considerable.

ITAR might make this complicated or impossible.

Oh! You're right, of course.

Elon got into it a little bit in his recent interview with Joe Rogan. If I understood it correctly, they essentially need an eastward-facing coast and all of the beaches along the Florida coast are residential. There weren't many options.

Why eastward?

Rockets launch eastwards to take advantage of the rotation of the planet to improve efficiency, and flying prototype rockets over land is frowned upon. That's also the direction satellites typically launch in.

IIRC there was also a consideration for how interested the local government even was in having them. Boca Chica was also a good option because the local government was very interested. The nearby Brownsville is on the poorer end of American cities, they benefit heavily from rich young engineers coming over to the area.

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