burning question.

[Mr.Rocket]

I was just playing ksp and noticed that whenever you launch straight up, you go into an east going orbit, which I guessed was because of the rotation of the planet. Is it possible to get into a west going orbit? If it is, I'm sure you would need a big rocket. Mine just exploded. You could also take this as a challenge, and try to do it.

[wasmic]

It's easy - you just have to gravity turn westwards instead of eastwards. And you the rockets only needs to have about 400 m/s more delta-V. If you go up to a really high orbit, as in minmus height or higher, you only need about 100 m/s to change orbital direction.

[Mr.Rocket]

But wouldn't you be going really slowly?

[capi3101]

No, you wouldn't. You can still get into orbit launching westward, you just don't get any additional benefit from the planet's rotation (in fact you lose a small amount by going that way, just not enough to make all that big of a difference).

Doesn't really require that big of a rocket either - my dinky little 0.18-demo-built Fireball 7 can launch to a westward orbit and still make a round-trip Mun landing mission.

[TheIncredibleDalek]

You want to get going up, then do a gravity turn at around 10,000m-12,000m up, only to the west. this will place you in a clockwise orbit (as viewed from above the north pole), or a "western" orbit. The problem is that it is just so darn inefficient to do that I rarely perform one.

[Kasuha]

You can get into retrograde orbit with just Kerbal X stock craft, no problem.

[Vector]

The rotation of the planet only makes a difference of about 174 m/s, so going east it helps you that much, going west it hurts that much. It's a relatively small difference but unless you have a good reason to go the other way, you might as well go east.