Is It Time To Move Kennedy?

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Shuttle Endeavour mission delayed again by weather

"The weather has just bitten us again," launch director Pete Nickolenko radioed to the Endeavour crew, as the spaceship's liftoff was postponed for the fifth time in about a month.

Yes I know, the closer to the equator you are the better the launch site but is it that much better than a place that's a little further north but has perfect launch weather like 98% of the time?  Like Edwards Air Force Base.  And now that LBJ is long gone we could move the Houston operation there too and save all kinds of transportation costs.

And yes I know that Hawaii would be perfect since it's much closer to the equator but it is also weather challenged and it would be costly to ship stuff there.

Comments

[Hootsbuddy]

Interesting suggestion. I don't know anything about the science involved but the economics makes sense. The site could still be a military resource which would make the politics easier for Floridians to swallow.

I have thought for years that the "third rail" of electoral politics was not Social Security but Florida. Neither party would approach the delicate balance posed by Cuban expats with the interesting result that Castro has become the longest surviving despot in human history, a personal sheltered pet of Uncle Sam thanks to the paranoid delusion that economic intercourse with Cuba would be dangerous. In a new age of public diplomacy tinkering with the Florida political ecology has become less dangerous. The current generation of Cuban-Americans seem more tractable than their seniors.

Is this a flash of insight you just got or are there seeds planted elsewhere advancing the same idea?

[geoff]

Isn't it where it is because of it's proximity to the equator? A quick look a Google maps indicates very few places within mainland USA outside of Florida that are closer to the earths mid-point.

[geoff]

my comment is redundant, I need more coffee.

[Jonathan Goff]

Ron,
Speaking as an aerospace engineer (who builds and flies rockets for his day job), there are at least a few technical challenges to do so, at least for traditional launch vehicles.

1-Staging. Most rockets that have ever flown (including shuttle) drop expendable pieces of hardware along the way. Other than Russia (out of necessity), staging is usually planned so that the pieces fall down in the middle of the ocean (typically from 300 to a couple thousand miles downrange). From Edwards, launching eastward, that implies dropping large chunks of metal over land. Now, Russia does this, but Russia also doesn't have an EPA. If you have a fully reusable vehicle this actually goes from being a bug to a feature, in that if you have to do an emergency landing, it's easier to do that at say a strip of highway or general aviation airport out in the middle of Nevada than halfway across the Atlantic.

2-Groundtracks. The FAA requires that you keep the odds of injuring uninvolved third parties to less than something like 30/1,000,000 (or maybe it was 1/30,000,000 -- my boss is the one who has to interface with the FAA). They calculate this by taking your "Instantaneous Impact Point" (the place you would crash if your engines died at any given instant, and there was no atmosphere) at each time, adding dispersions to it (to account for air and such), and then multiplying that by the population density at that point. It's kind of ugly math (that I've fortunately never been involved with), but the main takeaway is that you don't want to fly a rocket over any densely populated area until you have enough experience to prove that it's reliable...which is actually fairly common sense, the analysis is just a PIB. That also is a challenge for flying over land. Initially that's going to limit the trajectories and potential launch site locations quite a bit...Edwards still might be able to make it, but once again, it would need to be a fully reusable vehicle.

All of that ignores the politics of Sen's Shelby, Hutchison, and Nelson, all of who care far less about what NASA does than they do about keeping as many warm buttprints on seats in Huntsville, Houston, and the Space Coast.

~Jon

[Ron Beasley]

All good points Mr Goff, thank you.

[Jonathan Goff]

Ron,
Thanks! If anyone here actually cares, here are a few places where you can get more information.

From my blog three years ago, I actually wrote an article on the topic:
http://selenianboondocks.com/2006/08/rlv-spaceports-etc/

And for the really masochistic, here's an FAA circular telling you how to do the E-sub-c calculation... :
http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ast/licenses_permits/media/Ac4311fn.pdf

~Jon