DARK AND STORMY: Clouds pass over space shuttle Atlantis as it awaits liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this 2006 photo.
Image: NASA/Ken Thornsley
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Space shuttle Endeavour remains on the launch pad today after a series of weather delays nixed launch attempts Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Much of the country is balmy and dry this time of year but precipitation, wind and lightning are a mainstay along Florida's Atlantic coast, home to Kennedy Space Center.
Many satellite launches, including some for NASA, lift off from elsewhere in the U.S., namely Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. And the space agency utilizes other arid sites for shuttle operations, as well, landing the orbiter at Edwards Air Force Base in California when the weather over Kennedy is poor and even once easing it down at New Mexico's White Sands Space Harbor.
All of which begs the question: Why did NASA pick Cape Canaveral for its launch site, not only for the space shuttle program but also for the manned missions of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs?
We contacted space historian Roger Launius, a senior curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, to find out why NASA settled on lifting off from the Cape.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Why do we launch space shuttles from a place where the weather is such a constant source of trouble?
Well, is there any place where the weather is not an issue? You do it in the middle of the country and you get Tornado Alley. You do it in the South and you get hurricanes. On and on and on. There are always those issues.
Florida was chosen for several major reasons. One was, it's close to the equator. [The linear velocity of Earth's surface is greatest at the equator, much as a ceiling fan blade slices through the air faster at its tip than at its center hub, conferring a fuel-saving boost to spacecraft attempting to escape Earth's gravity.—Editor's Note]
The second reason was it had to be on the east coast, over the ocean, so you wouldn't fly over people that might get killed as stuff dropped off or blew up.
And the location that they chose in Florida had a lot to do with the fact that there wasn't anything there. You go there today and you don't see it, but Brevard County in the 1940s was a bunch of orchards and hardly anything else. And this island that they're on [Merritt Island] had good logistics, because there was a navy base and an army base not too far away. But there was no population density whatsoever. It was just a beach, essentially.
So you could build what you wanted, but it had decent roads because of the military, and that was important. This is one of the problems that [the Soviet Union] had with Baikonur [Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan], their launch site. I mean, it is in the middle of nowhere. They had to build a whole infrastructure to run rail out there, to build highways, to bring in all of the water and power and everything else that was necessary to make that place habitable.
You mention that it had to be on the east coast so the launch would climb over the ocean. Why do launches have to go east rather than, say, west from California?
When you launch headed east, you gain the rotation of the Earth in terms of acceleration. And so you don't have to have quite as powerful a rocket.
And that's a benefit related to the one conferred by being close to the equator.
That's right. The best place to launch is the spaceport that the European Space Agency has in French Guiana [five degrees north of the equator].
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23 Comments
Add CommentWhile I am not a rocket scientist and have never been on a turnip truck, why do I feel the decision was more political than is implied in the article. Indeed, much of the rationale comes across as pure BS. White Sands, Vandenburg, Utah, have been around "forever" to play on a concept. Yes, the infrastructure is perhaps too far gone to do a 180 at this point in time, but considering technology, expense of launching delays and landings, and so many other considerations like even a Cat V hurricane, the smell test is pretty rank.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it is brilliant to keep our space bound turnip launchers on the East coast on a sparsely populated peninsula close to the equator. At some point, science does become practical despite the smell politics and ignorance creates. A few weeks ago, actual science people found out the Earth was 25,000 miles around and rotates once every 24 hrs. So, if you head East, you have almost a 1000 mph jump into orbit. If you start from the West coast and head West, you either have to start with a 2000 mph relative disadvantage or fly right over the turnip fields of scientifically handicapped tax payers. Even politicians know better. So using scientific deduction, if it isn't politics making that smell, it must be ignorance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyone who has studied first year college level physics and engineering (really just physics would be enough) would realize that this explanation makes plenty of sense. Trying to insert political bias to it makes no sense. What political gain could they possibly have to keep launching from florida? Launching eastward from a near equatorial launching point with the lowest possible overflight of civilians makes a lot of sense to me. The shuttle can survive the trip through the atmosphere, I think it can survive florida's inclement wether. But LAUNCHING it during a storm isn't a good idea. I see no problems with this explanation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHailing from the Rocket City, surrounded by rocket scientists and having gone to college with members of NASA (I roomed with one and married the daughter of one of Von Braun's top US engineers from his original US team), I can attest that from the scientist's point of view, this article is dead on. With all the heavy engineering work being done here in Hunstville and with the extensive infrastructure here, I once asked my father-in-law why we didn't just launch from Huntsville. His answer was pretty much the exact same as this article. Besides the obvious acceleration advantage of Florida (and easy acces), note that with every launch we drop tanks that fall back to earth, which is a great reason for immediately heading out over water.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeveral missiles were launched from near the security of Patrick AFB during the late '50s. A major highway to transport all of the equipment necessary for the launches can only increase the potential for the site. The entire area was very remote, inexpensive, and has the natural land breaks of the inter-coastal water ways. Houston was the political designed site.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe smell test is pretty rank? I can't even understand what you are proposing. Are you suggesting that these other tests sites exist and, therefore, we should launch there? Others have already responded, but do you remember the protests about launch vehicles with nuclear power on board? Imagine launching one of those going East over the continental US, nevermind the advantage of the "near" equatorial location of Kennedy?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeriously dude, you need to start thinking about the information you read or hear and for crying out loud you're using the Internet. Go and read more about a topic before you believe a single article or blog.
As I recall, White Sands and Vandenberg are used as alternative LANDING sites, which have different considerations than LAUNCHING sites.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere's more to the moon than NASA will let us know!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.thelivingmoon.com/43ancients/02files/Moon_Images.html
http://www.checktheevidence.co.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=12&Itemid=63
Up until not too long ago we had a launch site at vandenburg AFB, SLC-6. It was meant to be for the shuttle for a polar orbit. The took it down not too long ago.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Complex_6
STS-127, Gone uphill, back in a week.
Here's an option: Scrap the entire program. I mean, what have we really gotten from these hundreds of billions of dollars that we couldn't have gotten from far cheaper means?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere we are 40 years after we walked on the moon and they are talking about putting a space base on Mars ... and we still can't keep things from falling off during launch. I thought our goverment spent billions to fix this problem.
I think it's time to cut our losses and face the fact that the cost benefit of NASA is next to nothing.
I think the launch trajectory take the shuttle over the ocean. That way if there are any mishaps during the launch, whatever is left will fall into the ocean instead of populated areas. Of course that would keep shuttle parts from raining down on populated areas if the problem happens on re-entry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPersonally, I'm more incensed at the political decision to change the chemical formulation of the foam insulation on the main tanker to comply with environmentalist nazis and their war on CFCs. That decision has already been directly responsible for the deaths of a shuttle crew.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(In case you didn't know, the crumbling foam problem is because the foam formula was changed to eliminate the use of CFCs.)
If we launched from sites other than the present one in Florida (with Florida's obvious inherent scientific advantages) then we would need to perform the political smell test, for the new location.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFlorida may have severe thunderstorms in the summer but the other 7-8 moths of the year are better than most of the country. Although, I wish they would move to a new location so that I could fish that part of the Banana River without having to paddle all day long.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfrgough flames that "Personally, I'm more incensed at the political decision to change the chemical formulation of the foam insulation on the main tanker to comply with environmentalist nazis and their war on CFCs. That decision has already been directly responsible for the deaths of a shuttle crew."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou're incensed about something that didn't happen.
The foam that struct Columbia's wing came from the bi-bod ramps. They still use CFC-11 for that to this day. You could look it up.
If there were political considerations, it would have been built in Texas. After all, that's why Johnson Space Center is where it is. The non-political decision would have been to build JSC in Florida also.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wondered this very thing when they couldn't land in Florida this past time...now I have some incite. Thanks!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wonder if it would be possible to change the orbit of the ISS. I'm not well educated in that area yet to give even a guess. But, it would seem in humanities best interest to put it in a better spot from which we could trampoline to the moon. On that note, I just hope all this Moon hype that is going around isn't just temporary. I hope that interest continues to be generated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy does NASA launch shuttles at all? We ought to have the ability to fly them to the edge of the atmosphere on planes, and then "launch" them from there. This whole "blasting a huge rocket all the way up" seems excessive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere's a question:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the distance between missile launches and targets are the same between the US and Russia, would the missiles from the US reach Russia before theirs?
This is hypothetical. Same distances, same velocities, etc.
I would guess that the US would reach Russia sites first since the Earth rotates East. Missiles heading West, as would the US missiles, the Russian targets would be rotating toward the missiles whereas the US targets would be rotating away from the missiles.
For anyone like me who has read G. K O'Neil's book "The High Fronteir" the whole shuttle story is a bit of a disappointment. Are any of those who have commented so far aware that the Saturn5 which launched the Apollo missions put as great a mass into low earth orbit ( LEO ) as the shuttle, and with the materials and technology of 45 years ago. Had they continued developing and producing the Saturn5 some of the weight saved could have gone into systems that allowed recovery of the lower stages before they crashed into the ocean. The apollo reentry capsules all worked successfully and could have been developed for landing on land as well as water. The mercury and apollo systems all had an emergency escape system for ejection at or around launch time, which the shuttle did not have- so in that respect the shuttle was and is less safe. Gerard O'Neil forecast that much of the hardware for the space power satelittes that had to come up from earth would be launched by "a big dumb booster" ( BDB )
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDeveloping that would probably have been a more pragmatic space programme than the shuttle, though less glamorous.Developing new concepts from scratch is always expensive, and particularly so if the programmes are then scrapped before significant implimentation. Competitive tendering does not always give the best solutions, especially when political considerations and conflicts of interest muddy the waters. It is tragic that loss of public interest after Apollo and the Vietnam War , displaced the US from a rationally developed space program based on two types of launcher, a BDM and a hybrid which exploited the oxygen in the air for the first few kilometres of a space flight, thereby saving the amount of oxidiser that required to be launched.
Vandenburg AFB in CA is used as a launch site for north-south oriented orbits. Great for spy satellites.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTexas had a good argument and location for building the launch complex but Florida won out for scientific reasons. If there were any politics involved it was building the NASA Mission Control complex near Houston. Florida was a scientific decision. Houston was all politics thanks to LBJ.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this