>>12005638It's easy to visualize if you're familiar with spherical geometry, and it's really trivial seen on video, but I have no idea how to make such video so I'll try my best to make it as simple as possible in words. TO KEEP EVERYTHING SIMPLE IMAGINE THERE'S ONLY EAST AND NORTH (the other directions will be the same since everything is symmetric).
Imagine to launch pointing north: you'd be going towards the north pole, and the orbital plane of your orbit would slice the Earth perpendicular to the equatorial plane, which is the maximum inclination any orbit can have (90°); doesn't matter where you are in the World, you'll be in a polar orbit. Now imagine to be at the equator and to be pointing east: your orbit from there would be at 0° of inclination and your orbital plane would lay perfectly on the equatorial plane. If you were to start pointing more and more towards the north the inclination of your orbit would rise consequently. So, to recap: pointing east minimum inclination, pointing north maximum inclination. Now the tricky part: by now you can imagine how the orbital plane is defined by where you're pointing at (basically your direction), but it's also defined by two other points:
>your positionobviously: the orbit and the orbital plane must pass through you
>the Earth's centerBecause that's what you're orbiting around
That said, now imagine to be still pointing east, but to move your starting position away from the equator: since you're holding east you're at your minimum inclination, but because the orbital plane is defined by both those aforementioned points your orbital plane has to gain the same inclination of your geographical inclination. Since pointing north gives you the maximum inclination, if you were to move away from pointing east you'd be moving towards north, meaning that your orbital inclination has to become higher, which in turn means that your orbital inclination while pointing east is the minimum inclination you can reach.
