Neither site is ideal, even restricting choices to the USA.
For polar orbit, obviously northern Alaska is proper. This minimizes the amount of east-west movement that must be cancelled out.
For more typical orbits, being near the equator is better. There are many choices, but Jarvis Island is probably the best. It has excellent weather and is nearly on the equator. Other good choices are Palmyra Atoll and Baker Island.
There is something to be said for altitude and dry air. Altitude is kind of obvious, yet not. Although the height is not significant relative to orbit, getting above a few miles of thick air is nice. Dry air is helpful with cryogenics; remember that ice destroyed a space shuttle. Due to the high heat inherent in solid-liquid transition of water, ice formation puts lots of heat into the cryogenics. These considerations point toward a site near Tuscon or on Hawaii's big island. The astronomers probably don't want to share either spot, but hey, they might get space telescopes in exchange.
Shipping rockets to tropical islands is brutal from a corrosion perspective, though. If I recall correctly, that was the root cause of SpaceX's failure of the first Falcon 1.
Interesting you say that. The engineers I talked to always told me that they preferred lower (sea level) launches because of disaster recovery (lower winds and lower potential contamination area) and because stats suggested lower launches gave more stability at the start of the flight when the rocket is typically most unstable.
I am _not_ rocket engineer though. This is simply what I remember experts telling me >10 years ago. :)
Not Tuscon but just west of White Sands Test Range (hence the Virgin Galactic spaceport) having the advantage of White Sands' unlimited restricted airspace to keep launches clean.
For polar orbit, obviously northern Alaska is proper. This minimizes the amount of east-west movement that must be cancelled out.
For more typical orbits, being near the equator is better. There are many choices, but Jarvis Island is probably the best. It has excellent weather and is nearly on the equator. Other good choices are Palmyra Atoll and Baker Island.
There is something to be said for altitude and dry air. Altitude is kind of obvious, yet not. Although the height is not significant relative to orbit, getting above a few miles of thick air is nice. Dry air is helpful with cryogenics; remember that ice destroyed a space shuttle. Due to the high heat inherent in solid-liquid transition of water, ice formation puts lots of heat into the cryogenics. These considerations point toward a site near Tuscon or on Hawaii's big island. The astronomers probably don't want to share either spot, but hey, they might get space telescopes in exchange.