[alancarp]

No - I lived in Orlando and Melbourne for 33 years and there was exactly ONE day in the teens. It was 18 degrees in 1980. The twenties are still rare -- and that's almost unheard of on the coast. And for Pete's sake, why is everybody thinking that NASA will launch at dawn???

Don't sweat it (no pun intended) folks -- NASA's got a whole lot more to worry about than temperature: and their post-Challenger guidelines are (I think) no launch under 45 degrees or so.

[XBob]

17 - Well, i grew up on Merritt Island, the home of the shuttle, and live there off and on, most all of my life.

The challenger was launched after enduring 7 days of off and on freezing in 1986.

Where did all the thousands and thousands of acres of frozen orange groves come from, in the 80's? Oranges have just about disappeared from Orange County. (note this requires sustained temps of 28 degrees).

One other thing, we are dealing with cryogenic fuels, hundreds of degrees below zero, and when you have the whole shuttle system, prefrozen/precooled near freezing, it doesn't take much more.

Remember those excellent pictures of the saturn launches, from the launch gantry, with all those pieces falling off, as it slowly rose in launch. That was ice.

Some years there is no freeqing. Some years there are numbers of freezes.