ST. GEORGE — Those outside late Wednesday night got a visual treat in the sky. It wasn’t a comet or a meteor but an encore return of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to the Southern Utah skies.
The rocket carrying a new batch of internet satellites for Starlink, which like SpaceX is owned by Elon Musk, launched from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base near Santa Barbara, California, at 10:09 p.m. MDT, according to the SpaceX website. Because of the flight’s height and trajectory, its upper reaches were seen in the night sky of Southern Utah as well as Arizona, Nevada and Southern California.
St. George News reader Bret Berger took pictures of the rocket’s plume in the sky from his vantage point east of the Canyons Softball Complex looking toward Santa Clara and Ivins.
It was a deja vu for many after another SpaceX-Starlink launch last October was also widely seen in Southern Utah skies.
There’s another similarity the Wednesday night launch had to the one back on Oct. 27: It was the same first stage of the reusable Falcon 9 rocket, known as B1071, that graced the Southern Utah skies last year. It was the booster’s 10th flight, according to SpaceX, and had launched four other times since last October.
And people here may see the same booster again. It landed successfully on a drone ship off Baja California for another reuse.
Not every SpaceX Falcon 9 launch can be seen in the local skies, as each flight has a different trajectory, according to the SpaceX website.
Most of the time, SpaceX missions launched from Vandenberg have a more western trajectory over the Pacific Ocean away from prying eyes beyond the West Coast. But once in a while, the mission requires a more southern, southeastern or eastern trajectory that means locals get a peek, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
As for the reason why a launch off California can be seen from here, it’s all about the height the rocket reaches between launch and stage separation – in this case, according to SpaceX, 51 miles above the surface or around the distance between St. George and Cedar City.
A person at the corner of St. George Boulevard and 200 East can’t see St. George City Hall just a block to the north, but they can see Dixie Rock high up more than a quarter of a mile away.
Science also has a reason why the rocket’s plume looked less like exhaust and more like a comet. At its height at the time at the very top of Earth’s atmosphere, there is little to no air. Little to no air, little to no air pressure. With nothing to hold the rocket’s exhaust in a straight line, it spreads out.
The Falcon 9 carrying 15 Starlink satellites was supposed to launch Tuesday night but was aborted with five seconds left in the countdown because of a second-stage technical issue. It was SpaceX’s 48th launch this year and the first to carry Starlink’s second-generation satellites from the West Coast. Most are launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida, SpaceX reports.
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