If you’re flying up or down the California coast any time soon, like, say, LAX, San Diego, Long Beach, or Orange County to San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, or Seattle, check the SpaceX launch schedule for launches out of Vandenberg.
If there’s anything that even might get off the ground while you’re over SoCal, get a window seat. On the left side of the plane if you’re flying from south to north, on the right side of the plane if you’re flying from north to south.
You want to have a view of the west. And the ocean. And the coast. And of Vandenberg.
This is the view to the west at 16:33 PST yesterday. That white streak in the upper center right is the contrail from Air China Flight #3126 from LAX to Shenzhen, China. (Okay, bad example, the cargo was unlikely to be looking out of the windows, but the pilots had a GREAT view! Work with me here.) Right about this moment a Falcon 9 was launching below and to their left, arcing up to the south and off-planet behind them. It would have looked spectacular!
Weather conditions were ideal for creating contrails, so I was able to spot the rocket with binoculars. (If the weather’s drier and there are no contrails, it’s needle-in-a-haystack time to spot a daytime launch.) As long as I didn’t look away or lose it I could follow the Falcon 9 through MECO (Main Engine Cut Off), staging (separation of the first & second stages), second stage ignition, fairing separation (the falling, tumbling fairing halves could be seen falling away for quite a while), and about 2/3 of the way to the southern horizon.
When I finally lost sight I checked and found that all that remained was this difuse bit of contrail, stretching from the northwest (in the bottom right) toward the southeast (upper left).
Oddly, I also experienced something that I’ve heard of in the Facebook group for Vandenberg launches – a sonic boom from the ascending booster. Folks in the Lompoc area (just a few miles from the launch site) hear the rocket’s roar, but folks in Ventura County are too far away for that. But they often report hearing what sounds like a sonic boom. I was skeptical that they would hear anything on ascent, but thought that it might be possible to hear the returning booster on an RTLS (Return To Launch Site) landing. But yesterday’s booster landed on the drone ship in the Pacific Ocean off of Baja California.
But about eleven minutes after launch, after I had come back into the house, the windows rattled and it sounded a LOT like a distant sonic boom. Now, you may have seen in the news that we had a M4.6 earthquake yesterday morning, and that (or an aftershock) will also rattle windows. It was a real attention getter! But I didn’t feel any ground motion or other symptoms when I heard the windows rattle, and the timing would have been right for a sonic boom created when the booster broke the sound barrier about a minute after launch.
Could be! I’ll have to pay more attention on future launches and not stop recording and go inside quite so quickly!
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 