I am far from a rocket launch expert, but having been to the general area, I think there is nowhere near enough empty space anywhere in Long Beach to safely build a launch facility.

Also the US has a pretty firm policy of never launching anything over land. There is no such thing as an eastbound launch from Vandenberg, for example.

You don't have to launch over land, just go the other way. BFR flying without a payload can easily go the long way around, launch west over pacific and land in Florida from the east.

The propellant for a two stage bfr has to cost at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars... plus launch prep costs and incremental cost of using up the life of engines. Even if each one is good for 100 launches, 1/100th of its fully loaded build cost had to be a lot of money.

Could that change in the future, assuming reliability improvements? Though, thinking about it a bit more I don’t really see why you’d want to launch eastbound out of Vandenberg. Not sure what you’d gain.

Vandernberg is generally used for highly inclined orbits or polar orbit launches. The earth's rotation is used to assist eastbound launches for equatorial/geostationary, so eastbound is preferred. Such as most of the launches from Florida and Wallops.

One of the weird bits of space trivia is that Israel's domestic rocket and satellite launch program makes the sacrifice of less efficient launches and less total delta-v in the first and second stages, by launching westbound over the ocean, because they really do not want to launch what is almost indistinguishable from a ballistic missile eastbound over their angry neighbors. Pretty much the only place in the world where low-inclination launches occur westbound.

Probably not. As their volume increases, even if their launches have a _really good_ success rate of 99.9% [1], catastrophic failure would still be frequent enough that you don't want to live under their flight path[2]. Even if they have a 100% success rate from here on out, there would still be issues with things like blowing out people's windows.

[1] They're at around 95% now, although gradually improving. Switching to a drastically different launch vehicle like the BFR will probably bring those numbers down, at least initially

[2] see https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882600/china-long-march..., or any of the cases where rockets killed people on the ground

Rotational speed of the Earth.

I guess if it can fly into space then it's just a matter of math to bring it back down where you want it.

I think the idea of a giant fuel air bomb the size of a small skyscraper falling on Los Angeles is a barrier here.

That's crazy. Not yet, anyway. While building a rocket it'll typically not be in a condition to launch it. Plus steering? Maybe BFR will once carry smaller rockets like airplane makers are doing it, but even that's far fetched.

Probably partially chosen due to the proximity to Vandenberg Air Force Base. Just a barge journey away from take off and landing zones.

I would be very surprised if BFR ever flew from Vandy. That sort of capacity isn't really needed for high inclination orbits.

Unless you're the NRO/DoD and want to launch some really, really high power synthetic aperture radar satellites into low altitude polar orbits, with massive photovoltaic arrays to power the radar (or nuclear reactors, as the Soviets did)

Yeah, maybe, but you can fly those payloads out of CCAFS too. I don't think there will be enough demand for high inclination massive payloads to support BFR capable pads on both coasts.

America once launched a reactor into space, the SNAP-10A, from Vandenberg. (Unlike the soviet reactors it was just an experiment.)

At least it didn't pull an uncontrolled reentry over the Canadian Arctic.

Note that the USAF launches Delta IV Heavy payloads from Vandy on a regular basis. Vandy is also occasionally used to launch retrograde.

Vandenberg is also used for westbound, retrograde launches for ballistic missile tests and anti-ballistic missile tests, to Kwajalein.

BFR is projected to have ~5X the lift capacity of the DIVH. That's just a crazy amount of mass. I really don't see the call for single payloads of that size to the orbits that Vandy serves. I certainly could be wrong, but I just don't see enough current or future demand to warrant constructing a pad capable of supporting BFR on the west coast.

If you give the NRO the ability to put 14,000 kilogram satellites in orbit they will certainly use it. Even if most of the extra mass is extra propellant for orbit-maintenance ion or hall effect thrusters. A lot of "big satellite" applications that use buses the size of current 6500 kilogram, largest possible telecom satellites, would be very happy to have a few thousand kj of extra propellant tanks available for the same launch cost.

There is stuff that big already. The F9 can launch 22,800kg to LEO. The BFL would launch 150,000kg to LEO. Who needs that outside of human missions?

“This is not a moon...”