NASA Space Station
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Kennedy Space Center — LC-39A
Apollo 11 and most of the Shuttle fleet left from this pad. SpaceX leases it now and flies Falcon Heavy and crew missions from the same concrete.
The sky from here
The sky over this spot is zone 4 — suburban edge, Bortle 4–5, with a naked-eye limit around magnitude 5.7–6.5. The Milky Way is a faint band overhead and gone lower down. The sky is noticeably grey rather than black.
Against that sky 99 of the 110 Messier objects are straightforward in 10×50 binoculars and 100 in a 130mm, with 21 reachable by eye alone. The nearest sky of Bortle 2 or better lies about 52 km north-east of here.
The Sun drops far enough below the horizon here for full astronomical darkness on every night of the year — which is not true of anywhere much further from the equator.
The centre of the galaxy reaches 32° 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.
The sky here is kindest to Triangulum Galaxy, Ring Nebula and Pleiades, each of which passes within a few degrees of overhead — 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 28.61°N 80.60°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 Kennedy Space Center?
Everything south of declination −61°. From 28.6°N that is a cap 29° 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 Kennedy Space Center get?
Between 6 hours 53 minutes on the shortest night of the year, around 21 June, and 10 hours 52 minutes on the longest, around 21 December. Astronomical darkness is the Sun more than eighteen degrees below the horizon, which is a stricter thing than the Sun being down. 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 Kennedy Space Center?
Anything inclined at 28.6° or more, for free. A rocket launched due east from 28.6°N arrives in an orbit inclined at 28.6° — 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. Steeper targets cost nothing extra: the 51.6° of the Space Station, and the near-polar sun-synchronous orbits the Earth-observation fleet uses, are all reachable directly. Shallower is where it gets expensive. Every one of the 28.6° 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 Kennedy Space Center from the other sites on this map?
The nearest is Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, about 14 km to the south. That is also the nearest other spaceport, with the next one 1,140 km beyond it. Measured as the great circle between coordinates, which is the shortest path across the surface and rarely the one you could travel.