Rockets Need Special Places to Launch, Here’s Where

Cape Canaveral sits off the east coast of Florida, roughly 3,200 kilometers from the Equator. This location is the perfect staging ground for rocket launches, as it provides a speed boost and energy savings for our launches. You see, as the Earth rotates it naturally generates kinetic energy, rotating slowest at the poles and fastest near the equator. This means that during launch, a rocket gets a generous speed boost assisted by the natural rotation of the planet.

But one of the most consistent hurdles we face when sending rockets to space is actually reaching a high enough speed to enter orbit…over 40,000 kilometers per hour, specifically. We call this speed the escape velocity. Basically, it takes A LOT of energy to propel a rocket with enough force to overcome Earth’s gravitational pull. But what’s really interesting is that the energy required to achieve escape velocity changes based on where you are on Earth.

So imagine you and a friend are on a Merry-go-round—one of you is near its center and the other is at its edge. You both are traveling around the same point at the same acceleration, but the person at the merry-go-round’s edge is traveling at a higher speed to make up for having to travel the additional distance around its perimeter. The center point in this example are Earth’s poles, the perimeter is the equator, and the distance between these two points is the latitude. So depending on how close a launch is to the equator, the greater the speed boost it’ll get from Earth’s natural rotation.