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"