Taiwan space program

I don’t know if anyone ever thought of this…

But I guess another reason China may want Taiwan is Taiwan is a GREAT place to launch orbit bound rockets!

You have basically half a world of absolutely nothing to the east of Taiwan, so if you launch any rocket you wouldn’t risk killing anyone in case of mishaps (except for a couple of taikonauts). I mean if you look at the map China is pretty restricted as far as being able to launch for equatorial orbits. You launch eastward because the Earth spins eastward at about 600m/s and that’s a good bit of extra speed boost to give you a lot more cargo capacity to orbit.

Right now it seems China’s more or less limited to polar orbits if they want to care about not killing people should the rocket fail… they’re not exactly clear on that front either.

I think Taiwan is better than Cape Canaveral as far as launch site goes and it’s a great shame that they’re not launching stuff to orbit themselves in Taiwan off of Suao or Hualien (rather than paying Space X to do it). I bet Taiwanese would crowd the east coast watching it too.

But Taiwan’s relatively low latitude makes it better for launching geostationary satellites too.

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I don’t think China is having much issues launching things into orbit these days. They have the second most satellites but still far behind the US. I don’t think they care about killing people all that much.

Way cheaper to just keep outsourcing it.

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I was going to add this. Taiwan got a steal from spacex and underpaid for satellite launches when the project cost went over what was agreed.