So...

[kalibex]

Why is NASA's launch center in FL, if the weather is so often problematic...?

Comments

[elsaf]

My understanding is that it's better to launch from the East Coast and better to land on the West Coast. In both cases, you've got water where you want it. The problem is, it's very, very expensive to transport the shuttle from the landing site to the launch site to use it again. So, they have to either launch from a less than ideal spot or land in a less than ideal spot.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

They launch from Florida because they want to launch out over the ocean, and because of the direction of the Earth's rotation they want to launch travelling east. If they launched from California, they'd be right over the continent after launch, and they'd rather be over water than over people in case anything goes wrong.

Landing in Florida is a bitch because of the weather, as we saw this week. It's flown manually by the commander, who likes to be able to see the runway. California has less cloud cover.

[drake57.livejournal.com]

What Elsa and Brenda said....plus it's just darn neat to launch from here :)

[whomiga.livejournal.com]

As for Launching, they try to get as close to the Equator as possible and over the water. In fact, Jules Verne has the launch of the rocket in From the Earth to the Moon take place in Florida. As for the landing, any bad weather condition can be quite detrimental as the Shuttle during landing is nothing but a VERY large glider which is landed manually by a human pilot (I can't imagine trying to land it in anything but great conditions :-)
This time, they specifically selected flight paths that would put the shuttle over land during landing as little as possible as they didn't want to litter the landscape with parts if the worst happened.