Kourou Spaceport

The Guiana Space Centre is a French and ESA spaceport to the northwest of Kourou in French Guiana, a region of France in South America. Operational since 1968, it is particularly suitable as a location for a spaceport. It fulfills the two major geographical requirements of such a site:

• It is near the equator, so that less energy is required to manoeuvre a spacecraft into an equatorial, geostationary orbit. Rockets launch to the east to take advantage of the angular momentum provided by Earth's rotation.
• It has open sea to the east, so that lower stages of rockets and debris from launch failures are unlikely to fall on human habitations.

All the Galileo FOC satellites have been launched from Kourou Spaceport, while IOV ones used Baikonur Cosmodrome.