NASA Space Station
Places · Spaceport
Cape Canaveral Space Force Station
The busiest launch site on Earth. SLC-40 alone now flies more often than most countries do, and the range next door handles the rest.
- Where
- Florida, United States
- Coordinates
- 28.49°N 80.58°W
- Since
- 1950
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- spaceforce.mil
The sky from here
This is a zone 5 sky — suburban on the nine-grade scale, Bortle 5–6, reaching roughly magnitude 5.2–6.0 unaided. The Milky Way is invisible or nearly so. Clouds are lit from below. You can read a newspaper outside on a clear night.
That grade puts 82 of the catalogue within easy reach of 10×50 binoculars and 85 within a 130mm — 15 of them need no instrument at all. Genuinely dark sky — zone 2 or darker — starts about 52 km east.
There is no season here in which the sky fails to get properly dark — the Sun clears eighteen degrees below the horizon on all 365 nights.
The centre of the galaxy reaches 33° at its highest, which puts the brightest part of the Milky Way clear of the horizon murk without ever being overhead. Of the 110 Messier objects, 3 never set from here and every one of them rises at some point in the year.
Of everything in the catalogue, Triangulum Galaxy, Pleiades and Ring Nebula are the best served here, climbing to within a few degrees of straight up — an object at the zenith is being seen through the least air it will ever be seen through, and the difference against the same object low in the south is not subtle.
Bode's Galaxy and Cigar Galaxy never set from this latitude, so they are available on any clear night of the year rather than for one season of it.
Read at 28.49°N 80.58°W. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
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Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station?
Everything south of declination −62°. From 28.5°N that is a cap 28° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 6.1% of the whole celestial sphere. Nothing about the calendar or the aperture changes that — the cap is below the horizon at every hour of every night. Its mirror image, the same 6.1% around the north celestial pole, is circumpolar here and never goes down.
How many hours of true darkness does Cape Canaveral Space Force Station get?
Between 6 hours 54 minutes on the shortest night of the year, around 21 June, and 10 hours 52 minutes on the longest, around 21 December. That counts only proper astronomical night, with the Sun eighteen degrees down; the merely-dark hours either side of it are longer. The sky here reaches it on every night of the year, which is not true much further from the equator.
What orbits can be reached from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station?
Anything inclined at 28.5° or more, for free. A rocket launched due east from 28.5°N arrives in an orbit inclined at 28.5° — the shallowest the site can reach without spending propellant to turn the plane — and steeper orbits are simply a matter of launching on a different heading. That leaves the Space Station at 51.6° and the sun-synchronous band near 98° both within easy reach, since going steeper is only a matter of choosing a different heading. Shallower is where it gets expensive. Every one of the 28.5° between here and the 0° of a geostationary belt is paid for in a plane change, which is why equatorial pads are worth building even in inconvenient places.
How far is Cape Canaveral Space Force Station from the other sites on this map?
The nearest is Landing Zones 1 & 2, about 3.2 km to the east. The nearest other spaceport is Kennedy Space Center — LC-39A, 14 km to the north. Distances are great-circle, so they are what a signal covers rather than what a road does.