Spaceflight Now
Places · Spaceport
Starbase
Where Starship is built and flown, on the Gulf coast a few miles from the Mexican border. The tower catches the booster on its return rather than landing it on legs.
- Where
- Boca Chica, Texas
- Coordinates
- 26.00°N 97.16°W
- Since
- 2019
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- spacex.com
The sky from here
This is a zone 4 sky — suburban edge on the nine-grade scale, Bortle 4–5, reaching roughly magnitude 5.7–6.5 unaided. The Milky Way is a faint band overhead and gone lower down. The sky is noticeably grey rather than black.
That grade puts 99 of the catalogue within easy reach of 10×50 binoculars and 100 within a 130mm — 21 of them need no instrument at all. Genuinely dark sky — zone 2 or darker — starts about 22 km south-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 35° 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, 2 never set from here and every one of them rises at some point in the year.
Of everything in the catalogue, Pleiades, Dumbbell Nebula and Crab 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 26.00°N 97.16°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 Starbase?
Everything south of declination −64°. From 26.0°N that is a cap 26° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 5.1% of the whole celestial sphere. That part of the sky is not merely a winter object or a difficult one; it is geometrically unavailable from this latitude. The equivalent cap around the north celestial pole is the compensation, and it never sets.
How many hours of true darkness does Starbase get?
10 hours 45 minutes on the best night, around 21 December, falling to 7 hours 13 minutes around 21 June. That counts only proper astronomical night, with the Sun eighteen degrees down; the merely-dark hours either side of it are longer. Every night of the year gets there eventually, which is the quiet advantage of not being any further from the equator than this.
What orbits can be reached from Starbase?
Anything inclined at 26.0° or more, for free. A rocket launched due east from 26.0°N arrives in an orbit inclined at 26.0° — 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. The Space Station's 51.6°, and any polar or sun-synchronous orbit, are all available from here. The bill arrives on the way down to the equator. Geostationary orbit is at 0°, so a satellite launched from here carries 26.0° of unwanted inclination that has to be removed in orbit, and the fuel to remove it is mass that is not the spacecraft.
How far is Starbase from the other sites on this map?
Johnson Space Center — Mission Control is the nearest thing to it here — 445 km to the north-east. The nearest other spaceport is Kennedy Space Center — LC-39A, 1,660 km to the east. Measured as the great circle between coordinates, which is the shortest path across the surface and rarely the one you could travel.