Places · Landing site
Landing Zones 1 & 2
The first orbital-class booster to land on land came back here in December 2015. Falcon Heavy's side boosters return to the pair of circles together.
- Where
- Cape Canaveral, Florida
- Coordinates
- 28.49°N 80.54°W
- Since
- 2015
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- spacex.com
The sky from here
The sky over this spot is zone 5 — suburban, Bortle 5–6, with a naked-eye limit around magnitude 5.2–6.0. The Milky Way is invisible or nearly so. Clouds are lit from below. You can read a newspaper outside on a clear night.
Against that sky 82 of the 110 Messier objects are straightforward in 10×50 binoculars and 85 in a 130mm, with 15 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 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.
The sky here is kindest to Triangulum Galaxy, Pleiades and Ring Nebula, 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 28.49°N 80.54°W. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
Nearby
Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Landing Zones 1 & 2?
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. It is out of reach permanently rather than seasonally: no time of year and no instrument brings it above the horizon. The matching 6.1% around the north celestial pole is the same geometry inverted, and never sets.
How many hours of true darkness does Landing Zones 1 & 2 get?
From about 6 hours 54 minutes at the thin end of the year, near 21 June, up to 10 hours 52 minutes around 21 December. The measure is astronomical darkness — the Sun a full eighteen degrees under — not simply the hours between sunset and sunrise. Unlike sites further from the equator, no part of the year here is written off entirely.
What has to be in orbit to come down at Landing Zones 1 & 2?
Something inclined at least 28.5°. A spacecraft's ground track only reaches as far from the equator as its own orbital inclination, so nothing in a shallower orbit than 28.5°N ever passes over this spot, and nothing in one can be brought down here without changing planes first. At exactly 28.5° the site sits at the turning point of the track and gets a single narrow opportunity; well above it the track crosses this latitude twice an orbit and the windows come round often.
How far is Landing Zones 1 & 2 from the other sites on this map?
Its closest neighbour on this map is Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, 3.2 km away to the west. The nearest other landing site is Port Canaveral droneship berth, 11 km to the south-west. These are straight-line distances over the surface, not driving distances, and in this part of the world the two can differ considerably.