cough cough Singapore…
Have a cough drop.
Indonesia would be a good location as well, and it’s near enough to all of the big SE Asian shipping lines that the Indonesian government would be making bank.
The only big problem would be keeping the PRC from deciding to have a new government that is “friendly” to their interests take power.
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That’s precisely why my suggestion didn’t put all the necessary assets in one country. If half the landing pads are in Indonesia, half in Malaysia, and the offices are in Singapore, you have to subvert three governments, not just one, and without tripping over everyone else trying to do the same. You’re going to have semi-permanent civil and military installations from each of the major groundside blocks surrounding the Starport Prime no matter where you put it, and the other candidate locations have weaker states with more centralized infrastructure – easier for, ahem, hostile takeover.
It’s not ideal, but there is no ideal location short of building a new island from scratch. Which might eventually happen, but not off the bat.
Each power bloc has a secondary port, of course; North America uses Mojave Spaceport, South America makes a deal with France to use the site at Kourou, while the EU and AU put theirs more conveniently in the North African desert; the Mideast powers combine for one in the Empty Quarter; India has a couple of choices, and China uses the Wenchang site on Hainan. Australia’s Outback is a wildcard that, while not challenging the other powers, serves as a catchall for business outside Prime and the bloc ports.
Since we’re talking planetary-scale relations, here’s another question: how do the Accords get handled for fragmented multipolitan planets like ours? Can a UN plenipotentiary team sign for all member states at once? I hardly think the Conclave wants to host a delegation from every microscopic dirtside entity…
This is a question that will be urgently necessary at once for dirtside concerns. Article 2, the Accord on Intellectual Property, will be demanded by every entity that realizes that until it is signed any extraterrestrial can steal any IP they want with no penalty. And Article 9, the Ley Accords, will be demanded as soon as the high commands get it through the civilians’ heads that it’s the only thing protecting us from the gentle ways of massed precision c-fractional gunboat diplomacy. And of course it’s hard to get extranet connectivity without Article 3, the Accord on Mail and Communications. The others may take more time to get ratified, but those really aren’t optional if you want to be anything other than roadkill.
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As the Imperial diplomats who helped write the damn things would suggest: “Working as intended.”
I mentioned this on the Discord but I really should have remembered to elaborate and share here too:
I know that Australia would definitely volunteer, because the currently proposed space facility at Katherine* hits many desirable characteristics. But it’s probably not equatorial enough and lacks tall mountains. Or short mountains. Or moderately sized hills.
(*Katherine is a town in the Northern Territory of Australia. It’s historically a local trading hub, being positioned “where the outback meets the tropics” and node of several overland trade routes + the rail line + the telegraph. It’s also been a military and mining hub for decades, meaning the locals are more accepting about Very Large Booms just out of town.)
It’s main features are “big flat area that mostly has very favourable weather, pre-existing transport hub, and a nice river near enough to make barges part of the transport infrastructure”, and geopolitical stability, and lack of abrupt natural disasters. And I guess under these circumstances, the ability to handle orion launches and refuelling as soon as everyone else stops weirdly panicking about Australia handling nuclear material.
The other option would be the Arnhem Space Centre, which has the advantage of being even further north (it’s only 12 degrees from the equator) and, of course, being a facility that already does launches. The problem there is that while it does have a good deep seaport that could be easily developed, and a decent airfield, it has very little road connection to anywhere at all and a population of 3200 souls. Which is why it was designed mostly for small and experimental satellites. (Bonus point being that if anything goes wrong, all debris falls into the shallow Gulf of Carpentaria where it’s easy to fish up again.)
You might be surprised. See: Very, Very Small States | The Associated Worlds (eldraeverse.com) - and bear in mind the current holder of the record for smallest Accord member is the Autarchic Habitat of Koesnrat (population 47).
(Opinions vary between worlds as to whether it’s better to cobble together a planetary organization and have one curate with a higher voting weight, or many less-weighted votes, also bearing in mind the minor perks concerning embassies, diplomatic immunity, and so forth - although you can still send observers, even as a non-member. Not to mention the tangled question of balkanized worlds whose major powers want to pursue radically different approaches to interstellar relations.)
But if you want to go to the trouble of supporting a delegation, you too can have a seat at near in the same neighborhood as the table.
On another note, the UN probably isn’t suitable as such an organization, certainly not in its present state. The Accord, or at least its various active bits, wants to be assured that it can get someone on the ‘net who can actually do something in the event of an event. On a good day, the UN can’t find the authority to make its members pay their delegates’ parking fines. Send someone with appropriate sovereign powers, please.
As a side note: it’s also difficult to attract a lot of traffic without the Accord on Trade and the relevant bits of the Law of Free Space and the Common Volumetric Accord. Insurance costs go way up for merchies willing to deal in sovereign risk, and many of those who do choose to ameliorate those costs by bolting some BFGs and a spite charge onto their “armed merchant freighters”.
Oh, I know. It’s what makes it fun.
This is probably a good choice. The only concern, really, is the proximity of the PRC and how worried we might be about their ability to resist doing something… stupid.
You don’t want to go straight for orbital elevators. Without the established traffic volume to support them, anything you make from trade is going right back out the door in operating and maintenance expenses. There are plenty of entire developed planets out there in the Core Markets that don’t have one.
The big sticking point here is starport extrality. If you have an ISA-managed port, violating that (especially militarily) means that the IN comes a-calling to explain to you the depth of your mistake. If you don’t…
…well, there’s a reason why even the rogue states of the 'verse tend to respect the extrality line, because it’s become a key part of interstellar trade, diplomacy, and interaction in general. There are lots of parties with an interest in seeing it maintained and violators punished, and are all too happy to chip in on the party. This can get real messy, real fast.
Possibly even two, or more, in the long run.
One because they probably want one for military purposes. (Neither the port director nor your military are likely to be greatly enthused by the prospect of running military operations out of a major civilian starport).
And on most developed worlds there are a variety of spaceports run by various people who have an interest in them and/or a lot of local traffic. Polities, corporations, hell, celebrities looking for easier yacht parking, etc., etc.
Of course, the interesting thing here is whether they are starports (with extrality) or mere spaceports (without). The latter is the obvious choice for military ports, and purely local traffic, but as suggested, offworld merchies don’t much like landing there unless there’s a healthy trust history built up. If you’re looking to attract interstellar trade to your local port (in ways other than just taking interface traffic from the highport), you will really want to go the former route.
Equatorial is not too big a consideration; it just ups fuel costs a bit matching the plane, and most modern drives can handle that just fine. It’s mostly an “all else being equal” sort of thing.
(And while having a mountain to use as a base for the gunspire is nice, you can always build an artificial mountain. Being an existing mining hub, they’ve probably got a bunch of suitable material for that just lying around anyway. 
)
As someone who, well, lives there (the Straits, not the PRC), I can offer the observation that the PRC really doesn’t hold as much sway as the Western media cycle tends to suggest. Countries in the SEA region have usually been pretty good about playing both sides against the middle, because we’re keenly aware that our geopolitical usefulness arose almost singularly from being a stumbling-block-turned-stopover-point between Europe and China.
That last fact, incidentally, would almost certainly also mean we’d be scrambling like a mad dog to keep our comparative advantage on choke-points alive, even more so when they’re man-made and give access to the fricking galaxy at large. A seller’s market, as it were, and the fact that projects like these have been bandied around for 4 centuries shows you that we’d be playing for keeps.
Lastly, I really don’t think the PRC would want to do silly-buggers on the elevator. If anything, it’s a localised point source of transport and commerce that pulls the economic CoG of the Pacific closer to Asia and away from the US and Europe. A country that for years has been trying to re-define the pathways that commerce and trade take to reach it away from Western control, is not going to pass up a literal gift from the space-gods that can do it within one Party Congress cycle.
Thinking about space ports in the US and the three biggest locations I can think of for laser lifters or catapults (no air-breathing fission engines, because the FAA is going to keep you calm while the nice men in the white suits bring you an I-Love-Me jacket…) would be Hawaii, Florida, and Texas.
Then, the image of Imperials in Texas hit me and for some reason I’m scaroused (scared and aroused)…
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Hawaii would be the ideal location for air-breathing fission spaceplanes, no? Miles and miles of ocean corridor for launch towards any azimuth, and you already have a dozen nuclear reactors parked at harbour anyway.
Your average Imperial is probably much taller than baseline human. Time to make “everything’s bigger in Texas” mean something…
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It’s less a matter of sway that I was thinking of, and more that having such an asset in both financial and power terms so nearby might make the people with a very large army a mite… itchy, and full of terrible ideas about a short victorious war and a fait accompli.
(The more so if provoked by not getting what they deem to be their fair share of interstellar trade, due to a certain “Sorry, we have trading standards to comply with, you fascist fuckwidgets. Oh, sorry, did we say that last part out loud?” attitude on certain parties’ part.)
Wusses. Not every nucjet is XK-PLUTO (sometimes they’re just a General Electric J87), and a little Cherenkov glow never hurt anyone.
The FAA is in the very unenviable position of trying to ensure that air (and probably space travel) is both perceived and actually is reasonably safe in most regards, while also trying to provide innovation and improvements to the systems involved.
The word “fission” is going to cause most people to break out in Victorian-level hysterics that starts with “CHERNOBYLTHREEMILEISLANDNUCLEARDISASTERTHEDAYAFTERWE’REALLGOINGTODIE!!!”…and might get worse from there…
…despite the fact that those engines might actually be both safer and generally better than ones burning JP-4.
I love people, but I also know how often panic can hit.
One might hope people would wise up when they realized how much it was adding to their freighting costs, but on the other hand, the Jones Act is still law.
On the gripping hand, as with so many innovations, this provides a comparative advantage to smaller countries with fewer fucks to give.
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Shower-thought: The folks in charge of enforcing ITAR are going to have a complete meltdown. Or maybe an early retirement, it’s hard to tell.
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Both, probably.
Also the DoE when preppers start buying house-sized RTGs.
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One can hope. And, you’d be amazed at how often bad law can remain on the books, for whatever reasons. Like the fact that the US Army maintained a stockpile of molhair(sp?) wool until the late '90s. Why? If they had to make uniforms out of it. Which they hadn’t since the '50s.
Of course, on a related note, there’s whether certain treaties would stand long enough for World Assembly of Sarine v. Galactic Volumetric Registry, Calcic-Photonic Condominion and First Distributed Exclavine Republic, Central Conclave Court to kick in.
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The Outer Space Treaty has always struck me as the kind of deal that an exasperated parent imposes on two squabbling siblings, only for it to be amicably forgotten as the two of them grow up.
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Fight panic with panic. Hilarious will be the day when the general public turns from eschewing nuclear to espousing nuclear, all because THECHINESEHAVEALREADYDONEIT. It’s working for space exploration, I don’t see why it wouldn’t extend to safe, non-provocative, civilian, less than one-and-a-half-use nucleonic propulsion.