I was in the backyard tonight barbecuing a nice rack of lamb and drinking a nice Napa cab when I looked up in the sky and saw something that I had never seen before. I watch the planets and the constellations and sometimes make the effort to see "blood moons" and such (as you know from this post). I called Cathy over to see the thing and we joked about it being a UFO, but the rack was done and it was time to eat. Here is the answer to the spatial mystery
Elon Musk’s rocket company launched a commercial satellite for Argentina on Sunday evening, marking SpaceX’s 17th mission of 2018 in the type of steady success that so far has eluded his electric-car maker Tesla Inc.
The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s central coast about 7:21 p.m. local time. About 8 minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s first stage returned and landed at Vandenberg in a first for a California-based SpaceX launch. The second stage deployed SAOCOM 1A, an Argentine Earth-imaging satellite, roughly 12 minutes after the launch.
When I was a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy I had a chance to tour a missile silo at Vandenberg AFB in 1977. That was cool but the fact that Musk's team can launch and retrieve a rocket from/to Vandenberg is….well, cooler. Did anyone else in B'game see it?
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