There are two occasions when things that should have REALLY messed up the timeline are just "let happen". One was the death of 3000+ in "Shockwave". The other was the initial assault and 7 million deaths in "The Expanse". 7 million fatalities, 700 years earlier in history, plus the butterfly effect, would have deleted basically everyone from the future timeline.
The resolution to the two was dissimilar. Daniels was fine with patching up the "Shockwave" incident so that it happening was still compatible with the history he knew: all that mattered was that Archer's team was absolved of blame and guilt. OTOH, Daniels never indicated that the events of "The Expanse" would have been contrary to his preferred timeline: apparently, this preferred timeline included a well-fought Temporal War (read: his side won) rather than the negation of one.
Time in Trek works without a butterfly effect anyway, for whatever reason. Minor changes such as the death of one, or the deaths of 3000+, do not cascade into big changes but instead get damped out. A couple of models for how this could be:
1) Time is the sum total of all time travel, and time travel happens a lot - infinitely so, in fact. Most time travelers in the Milky Way are humanlike, so time in these parts reflects human beliefs and mores. And humans are petty, so time is, too: change might benefit others, so change gets squashed, and status quo promoted.
2) Our heroes always end up "altering the past" in ways that "restore" their preferred present/future, not because the stuff done in the past would result in restoration, but because the mechanism of time travel makes our heroes prefer whatever outcome they create. If they go to the past to stop Billy Bob Nowan from being assassinated, they will return to a future where him being alive and well in 1998 is desirable and important to this future - and they retroactively end up having started from such a future as well, even if another set of Kirks, Spock, McCoys and so forth was perfectly happy with the world where Billy Bob Nowan died and the world saw two centuries of unbroken peace and calm as the result.
3) The butterfly effect simply doesn't exist: there will always be a Jim Kirk, even if somebody stomping on a lepidopterioid made a zillion people die and Jim Kirk look more like Chris Pine or Lloyd Bridges than William Shatner. Or, rather, everything changes when something changes, but down the timestream, the changes accumulate in infinitely many ways, and the camera always follows the one way that results in an essentially unaltered future.
Florida should always be a useful launch place, unless anti-gravity is so cheap and easy that the rotational boost it provides is totally unnecessary. Patching the cracks, a shuttle could go up to orbit from San Francisco, but heavier launches might still be based at Canaveral.
Florida isn't on the equator, though. Out of the places hit by the first weapon, all the others would be superior, with free ocean to the east but better torque from the latitude. Unless one assumes the island of Cuba won't have the infrastructure access the two continental spots would enjoy (it's a big place with room for said infrastructure, but perhaps it's a natural preserve, or again a political pariah, or full of dinosaurs, or zombies from the last biowar, or all of the above) And if overseas transport is not a problem, then perhaps spaceports should be mid-oceanic to begin with?
Nothing wrong with using Florida as a North American spaceport location, though.
Timo Saloniemi
