It depends on what they want to launch. It is poorly located for a geostationary satellite, yes. It is actually really good for a GPS launch, though. Nova Scotia is at 45 deg latitude with a coast line facing East/Southeast. That allows them to launch into orbits that are medium Inclination very cheaply, since Inclination changes are way more expensive than adding the extra speed launching at the equator adds. GPS is a 55 deg inclination. Starlink is between 43 and 70 deg inclination. Proliferated LEO constellations are the new hotness, and those will all be inclined, so this isn’t a terrible location.
Yep, I was gonna say, yeah you do lose a tiny bit of that effective ‘free’ ∆v from equatorial proximity, but the trade off is that its easier to establish orbits of greater inclination, which are actually pretty common, desired trajectories.
Higher lattitude launch sites can be better for certain trajectories leaving the earth-moon system, sun-synchronous orbits, polar orbits… basically spy satellites / scientific earth observation sats… rendevouz trajectories with various high inclination asteroids, kuiper belt objects, comets.
Vandenberg is at ~35⁰, Plesetsk (sp?) is at ~68⁰… they’re fairly commonly used for spy sat launches, but I think a fair number of StarLink sats have launched from Vandenberg as well.
And it shouldn’t be understated, the benefit of having basically a bunch of nothing to the East.
China’s had a number of fairly recent incidents of launch muckups raining shit down over populated areas… as has Musk from Boca Chica.
It depends on what they want to launch. It is poorly located for a geostationary satellite, yes. It is actually really good for a GPS launch, though. Nova Scotia is at 45 deg latitude with a coast line facing East/Southeast. That allows them to launch into orbits that are medium Inclination very cheaply, since Inclination changes are way more expensive than adding the extra speed launching at the equator adds. GPS is a 55 deg inclination. Starlink is between 43 and 70 deg inclination. Proliferated LEO constellations are the new hotness, and those will all be inclined, so this isn’t a terrible location.
Yep, I was gonna say, yeah you do lose a tiny bit of that effective ‘free’ ∆v from equatorial proximity, but the trade off is that its easier to establish orbits of greater inclination, which are actually pretty common, desired trajectories.
Higher lattitude launch sites can be better for certain trajectories leaving the earth-moon system, sun-synchronous orbits, polar orbits… basically spy satellites / scientific earth observation sats… rendevouz trajectories with various high inclination asteroids, kuiper belt objects, comets.
Vandenberg is at ~35⁰, Plesetsk (sp?) is at ~68⁰… they’re fairly commonly used for spy sat launches, but I think a fair number of StarLink sats have launched from Vandenberg as well.
And it shouldn’t be understated, the benefit of having basically a bunch of nothing to the East.
China’s had a number of fairly recent incidents of launch muckups raining shit down over populated areas… as has Musk from Boca Chica.