In the wake of the damage to Michoud by Katrina, and the threat to the Cape from Ophelia, one of Alan Boyle's readers has an idea to avoid further impacts to the space program from tropical weather:

NASA will have to weigh the benefits of the possibility of keeping space shuttle faculties in the Gulf Coast or relocating elsewhere in the United States to avoid the specter of frequent hurricanes. In the beginning of the space shuttle program, Vandenberg Air Force Base (Lompoc, Calif.) was to be a West Coast launch site. Thanks to budget cuts, Vandenberg AFB never was expanded for shuttle launches. While NASA might have gotten off easy this time, NASA might not be so lucky after the next hurricane. NASA and its contractors might consider moving back out to the West Coast and move its displaced workers at the same time. The facilities are still here at Plant 42, Edwards Air Force Base and Phillips Laboratory as well as throughout Southern California.

"Having grown up in the Antelope Valley (in Lancaster), in the shadow of Edwards AFB (where the shuttle landed last time) and Palmdale’s Plant 42 (where the shuttle fleet was built), with some of the people and the tooling available (what’s the cost of a retrofit?), it might make sense to move back out to California for a time to escape further hurricanes.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. First of all, while Vandenberg was planned to be a west-coast launch site at one time, the facilities to support the Shuttle have all been converted to other uses, and even when they were in place, there were many technical issues with them (the primary one being hydrogen trapping at the pad, with associated explosion risk). To restore a capability that was never fully there in the first place would almost certainly take longer than the time that the Shuttle has remaining in its planned program life (i.e., by 2010).

But more fundamentally, even if we could launch Shuttles out of Vandenberg, it was never intended to be a backup site to the Cape. It was a launch site for different kinds of missions (primarily military) that require a high orbital inclination (72 degrees and above).

It's not possible to reach an inclination lower than the latitude of the launch site without extreme performance penalties. Because the Cape has a latitude of 28.5 degrees, it allows launches to a 28.5 degree orbit, by launching with an azimuth (initial direction of flight from the launch site) of due east. Any deviation from that azimuth, either north or south, will result in an inclination higher than that.

Vandenberg is farther north, at 34 degrees, so that's the lowest inclination that one could attain from there by launching due east. Now that would be all right, since the ISS is at a higher inclination (51.6 degrees). The problem is that one can't launch due east from Vandenberg, because this would result in an ascent over the population of the United States, and dropping the SRBs out in the California desert. The only allowable launches from Vandenberg are south into the Pacific, and the minimum azimuth that doesn't overfly the US or Mexico allows a minimum inclination of 72 degrees. The only was to get around this is to do what's called "yaw steering" in which a turn is made after land overflight is no longer an issue, but this entails a severe hit on performance. The minimum inclination that one could have gotten out of a Shuttle from Vandenberg would have been about sixty degrees, and that's with zero payload.

So while moving the Shuttle operations to California sounds like a good idea in theory (at least to some Californians), it really makes little sense from either a programmatic or physical standpoint.

Besides which, California has hazards of its own, which can occur with nothing like the advance warning that Florida and the Gulf Coast get WRT hurricanes.

You mean the brushfires, the riots (been a while since the last one, though), ever-present threat of blockades by santimonious peaceniks and Gaia worshipers, or the lack of a local NFL team?

Wasn't there some little town in the South West that wanted to become a private spaceport? (Can't remember the name right off the bat.) Would they suffer the same problems?

My understanding is that Vandenberg was intended, to be used, to launch the shuttle on polar orbits. This is back in the day when they believed the flight rate was going to be fifty flights a year. The Air Force was supposed to use the shuttle to put oodles of spy satellites up.

When the shuttle's roll-out, flight rate and performance didn't turn out as advertised the venture was abandoned. There was an earthquake in the late seventies or early eighties which played into the calculus as well.

Yeahbut... a little space debris would add a bit of diversion from all the Mojave dust devils. ;-)

You mean the brushfires, the riots (been a while since the last one, though), ever-present threat of blockades by santimonious peaceniks and Gaia worshipers, or the lack of a local NFL team?

Actually, the main one I had in mind was, doesn't Sean Penn live in California? And since he managed to keep his boat from sinking he's, like, still alive and stuff.

I would have included the L.A. Times, but as predictable as they are, a warning system would involve setting an alarm clock.

Well, the lack of an NFL team is self imposed. LA had the Raiders and the Rams and now nothing. I'm not sure that can be a qualifier for your earlier statement. Move the whole kit and caboodle to San Antonio AND give us an NFL franchise. We've got a 10k foot runway at Lackland AFB and plenty of football fans. We have lots of workers too for the other stuff and a huge influx of evacuees from N.O. anyway, so we have the workforce.

I note that without the first redesign of the shuttle tank - which shaved 8000 lbs (the "super lightweight tank" completed in 1996) - we'd be unable to deliver shuttle payloads of any size to 51.6 degrees from KSC, period.

We could haul at least twice as much mass to the ISS if we launched shuttles from Baikonur.

Oh, wait, it's cold there half the year, can't launch either...

Wait, we're only launching shuttles once a year as it is... hmmm...