Soo, back to launching space ships.
Isnt New Zealand a bad place to actually do this? I mean it requires more energy, isnt it?
Compared to what?
Yeah, the closer to the equator the lower the energy needed, with the savings in m/s of deltaV proportional to the cosine of the latitude, up to a maximum of about 460 m/s saved (launching on the equator) out of 7800 m/s orbital velocity plus another 1500 - 2000 m/s lost to air resistance.
Northern NZ is 34.5 south, saving 380 m/s
RocketLabs site at Mahia NZ is 39s, saving 357 m/s
Cape Canaveral is 28.5 north, saving 404 m/s
Baikonur is at about 46 north, saving 320 m/s
So Mahia is less than 50 m/s worse than Cape Canaveral, out of a total budget needed of 9500+ m/s. No biggie.
At one time people (mostly the military) cared about getting the maximum possible performance, regardless of the cost. The biggest bomb they could put on a given rocket, or the smallest possible rocket for a given bomb.
Now that's completely unimportant. Now the thing to care about is total launch cost per kg of satellite. That depends on a large number of factors but the size of the rocket, the amount of fuel used, or 50 m/s of deltaV needed are way down in the noise. Construction cost, number of personnel to support the launch, transport costs are much more important. And, in the near future, reusability.
The thing I don't get about RocketLab is how they will make money when SpaceX already had and retired the Falcon 1 as uneconomic, when it took considerably more payload for about the same price as RocketLab's Electron.
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