In California skies, more of rockets’ silken glare

After sundown on Oct. 7, many people in Southern California looked up and spotted the red glare of a rocket. Mara Altman was at a fundraiser on a farm outside San Diego. A mariachi band was playing when the guests saw the rocket. “I had no idea,” she said. “People were like mesmerized.”

The trumpet player put down his instrument and took out his phone to record the rocket’s flight. The singer kept singing, while gazing at the sky.

It’s a scene that Southern Californians should expect to see in their skies more often as privately owned rocket companies expand their use of a nearby launch site.

The rocket that day, a Falcon 9 built by SpaceX, was carrying an Argentine satellite into space. It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, 140 miles northwest of Los Angeles. As SpaceX quickens its pace of launching, more of its rockets will blast off from the California launchpad.

If you were close enough, you might have also enjoyed a double spectacle when the rocket’s booster stage returned a few minutes later to land at Vandenberg, the first time that SpaceX had achieved that feat on the West Coast. (On earlier SpaceX launches there, the booster set down on a barge in the Pacific.)

Besides producing bright flames from its engines, a rocket leaves behind a trail of water vapor from its exhaust, which forms a condensation trail — a long artificial cloud that this month was visible some time after the rocket disappeared.

When the launch is near sunrise or sunset — when the ground is in darkness but the sky is still bright — sunlight glistens off the contrails, adding to the splendor.

Vandenberg AFB served as the center of development and testing of ballistic missiles in the 1960s and 1970s. Later, larger rockets carrying secretive military satellites blasted off from there. With a swath of open ocean to the south of Vandenberg, the site is ideal for launching spacecraft on orbits passing over Earth’s poles.

In the 1980s, the West Coast was set to observe the sky-rattling rumble of the space shuttles, which were originally intended to take over the launching of military satellites in addition to their NASA missions. The Air Force spent billions preparing a launch site, and the prototype Enterprise orbiter made a trip there to test out the facilities. But after the loss of Challenger in 1986, the Air Force decided that traditional crewless rockets were better and safer, and no shuttles ever launched from Vandenberg.

In recent years, commercial companies have taken over some of the launchpads. SpaceX leased Launch Complex 4, previously used for Air Force Atlas and Titan rockets. The company launched the first Falcon 9 from Vandenberg in 2013. SpaceX later leased a second site for the landing of its reusable boosters.

There have been 11 launches so far this year from Vandenberg, five of them by SpaceX. Over the decades, the number of launches has actually been declining, from more than 900 in the 1960s to 79 so far this decade. But the pace has been picking up. With nearly three months left in 2018, SpaceX has already launched as many rockets as they did in all of 2017.

In addition to SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Harris are leasing space at Vandenberg from the Air Force. Firefly Aerospace is planning to commandeer another Vandenberg launchpad for future commercial endeavors.

But even the most dramatic displays can lose their luster with repeated viewing. Altman probably won’t go out of her way to watch another rocket go by.

“It was cool,” she said. “It also just looked like two headlights separating.”