Many of us in the San Joaquin Valley have seen the exhaust trail of a rocket launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base near the coast at sunset. There's another significant rocket launch site in the U.S., on the East Coast at Cape Canaveral, Florida. That's where they launched both the Saturn V rockets that took astronauts to the Moon in the late 1960's and early 1970's, and the 30 year Space Shuttle program that began shortly thereafter. But why launch from Vandenberg at all? Why not just do all rocket launches from Florida?   It has to do with where the rocket is going, which is going to be one of three places. It's either going out to space, or in to one of two kinds of Earth orbit. If it's something like a weather or communications satellite, and is going to remain in one spot in the sky for its lifetime, that's called Geosynchronous Orbit. That's a relatively high Earth orbit... around 22,000 miles above the Earth. Another option is for the satellite to go into Polar Orbit. That...