Hacker News Reader

Comment by enricobruschini | Hacker News Reader

Would have made sense to build it closer to the equator? As from my orbits class the more you get closer to the equator, the bigger is your launches time-window to hit the target orbit. Texas sounds unreasonable, does anybody knows/sees other good reasons?

View on HN

As rkuykendall-com mentioned, its as far south in the US as you can get without overflying other land, and they've gotta stay in the US to prevent ITAR violations.

[+] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_R...

Why not Hawaii then? Would the rocket overfly the Americas at an appropriate height?

Shipping rockets is enormously risky and expensive.

I agree with it being expensive. I don't see how it would be risky, you wouldn't fuel the rockets before you shipped them, that would be bonkers.

Rockets have the structural integrity of a pop can.

And yet pop cans travel halfway around the world daily... I don't see the issue. As I said, it could be expensive, but there's no risk or danger in it.

People transport extremely fragile things by sea all the time. You may have to be mindful of weather, but it is do-able with the will and money.

> And yet pop cans travel halfway around the world daily

Empty pop cans? Several stories tall?

How many pop cans are damaged or destroyed in shipping?

Any rate at all is higher than is tolerable for rockets costing many orders of magnitude more.

> I don't see the issue

REALLY?!?!

Your pop can is not filled up with tons of explosive materials and didn't cost millions of dollars.

The worse thing that can happen if your pop can is damaged is you get a flat soda or a leaky can.

Russia ships Soyuz to Kuru for Arian. Apparently, it is worth the cost and there has been no failures.

When they were starting out with Falcon 1 launch attempts, they were using Kwajalein Atoll. They had tons of problems with corrosion from sea-water in the air though. I imagine that might be a concern in Hawaii as well, depending on which islands were available.

They'll still be near sea-water in Texas of course, but perhaps the wind tends to blow west to east, with the jetstream? I'm not sure.

They are almost as far south as they can be and still be in the United States, which is where the company is based.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com