To be fair, it’s not the cost of the fuel itself that is an issue for rocket launches, just that so much of it is required, and it adds so much weight to the rocket. Fuel is less than 1% of the cost of a rocket launch, yet typically over 90% of the mass of the entire launch. If you could somehow spend fuel on the ground moving things to an optimal launch point to have to put less fuel in the rocket, it would absolutely be worth it.
The real issue is that launching from a mountain would not save you much fuel anyways. To get to orbit requires you to go very fast sideways. The initial “upward” part of a launch is just to get past the thickest part of the atmosphere, then it quickly pivots sideways for the majority of its journey.
You save more fuel by launching from a lower altitude closer to the equator, where you can take more advantage of earth’s spin to gain additional sideways velocity. So we do spend a lot of fuel to do this, for example SpaceX manufactures their rockets in Hawthorne, California, where there is a lot of aerospace manufacturing expertise, and spends a lot of fuel to ship them to Cape Canaveral, Florida, which is closer to the equator.
SpaceX is putting a launch site in South Louisiana for the same reason. There is also an advantage of movement of parts by water, from either the Mississippi, through the Panama Canal, or down the East Coast.
Pretty sure yall know our reputation for flatness and sea levels. Solid rock and high ground is pretty much non existent, in most of the state. Our only "mountain" is something like 300ft.
They’re putting it there for longer time over water when launching south for polar orbits. Also fuel is made there so less to pipe or ship. They’re planning on making starship there too so not so much for shipping.
I’d known about the time over water thing, considering Canaveral has always been our main launch site. I was very interested in the shuttle as an 80’s kid.
Ive been getting back into that interest, since buying Rocket Lab stock.
There was a local company that manufactured the “big gas tank” for the space shuttles, and there was a much larger ship building industry here in the past. I suppose that played into the decision.
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u/rysy0o0 4d ago
It would cost a lot of money to haul all the rocket parts and fuel on top of a mountain