CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Incredibly, there's only one thing standing in the way of doubling the pace at which rockets can be launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station: another set of launch pad floodlights.
"That's true," said Lt. Alana Austin, a spokeswoman for the 45th Space Wing at Patrick Air Force Base, which manages the air station and the Eastern Range. "But we do have new lights on order."
In fact, $400,000 worth of lights are scheduled to be delivered to Cape Canaveral, assembled and tested in time to support launch operations in August, Austin said.
For now, a long-standing goal to reduce the minimum time between launches from 48 hours to 24 hours will have to wait until August, unless at least one of any scheduled back-to-back missions are to lift off during the day.
"That limitation is based on the time demands for lights to be active since the Wing does not currently have enough [equipment] to support dual nighttime operations," the Air Force said in a written response to a query from SPACE.com.
In addition to illuminating the skies for miles around the Cape and drawing all eyes to the rocket, the lights serve a practical purpose of allowing launch-pad workers to see what they are doing at night.
The Eastern Range is managed by the Air Force and is responsible for ensuring that all rockets launched from Florida's Space Coast do so without harming anyone on the ground.
The Air Force's inability to quickly reconfigure its equipment to suit each rocket has kept the rate at which rockets are launched to no more than one every 48 hours.
But ongoing progress in a $1.2 billion effort to modernize the 50-year-old range has now dropped that turn around time to 24 hours, which provides everyone with more flexibility to schedule their rockets for launch.
Except, apparently, when nighttime launch windows get in the way.
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