Earlier today a Proton-M rocket took off, carrying a Sirius FM6 satellite radio payload destined for geosynchronous orbit. Nothing super exciting, Briz-M upper stage for transfer burns and then the payload itself has some small engines on it for final geosync insertion.
The weird bit is the orbital inclination. Check this out:
It launches on a 51º inclination, then does a plane change to 0º once it hits geosynchronous altitude! Plane changes aren't cheap; I would have expected it to be much more efficient to just launch as close to 0º as possible and make whatever minor corrections are needed to get into geosync. At first I thought it might be because it was dropping off other satellites enroute, but the mission timeline doesn't list anything like that.
So, why would they use such a high-inclination orbit?