When my children finally are ready to learn physics, chemistry, biology, I’m going to make sure they see the best visualizations out there. Too often people are expected to imagine stuff like this in their head after studying the equations and concepts.
The telescope will travel to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, which is ~one million miles away and about four times farther from Earth than the Moon. At L2, the combined gravity of the Sun and Earth will give Roman a stable vantage point with a clear, unobstructed view to survey deep space and accomplish its mission
Elon Musk breaks down how he found the only piece of American coastline SpaceX could launch from
There was no site search team.
Elon: "I was just literally looking at satellite images"
Orbit is a sideways problem, not an upward one.
Elon: "the gravity at the altitude of the space station is almost the same as it is on the ground"
Elon: "it's actually moving around the Earth at 17,000 miles an hour"
Which decides the geography for you.
Elon: "you want to launch eastward, so that you can take advantage of Earth's rotation to get to orbit"
That rules out almost everything.
Elon: "almost really all of Florida, except for Cape Canaveral, is wall to wall houses on the beach"
Elon: "one of the few spots that wasn't occupied was the area just adjacent to the border with Mexico"
There was a reason nobody wanted it.
Elon: "there was at one point a development that was going to take place, but then a hurricane came and destroyed the entire place, and in fact rearranged the land, so some of the plots were underwater"
And leaving the country was never an option.
Elon: "it needed to be US land, because rocket technology is an advanced weapons technology"