It’s a shame I don’t spend my nights looking at the sky because apparently, this was the weekend to be doing exactly that. On Saturday night, May 14, Sydney residents looked up and saw a consecutive line of white dots shooting through the sky. Was it a bird? Was it a plane? Was it a UFO? Nope, just Elon Musk doing his thang.
What Sydneysiders saw was actually 53 satellites from the SpaceX subsidiary which were launched from a Space Force Station in Florida. Astrophysicist Brad Tucker told Sydney Morning Herald that each dot is a satellite launched metres apart, which then slowly spread out by hundreds of metres. Makes much more logistical sense, I guess.
It all kicked off on Saturday (well, in AEDT time at least) with the satellites making their way south-east into a low-Earth orbit. This is the explanation behind what everyone else but me saw. The satellites are from Musk’s Starlink company and all part of a big mission to provide fast broadband access in areas where it is otherwise either unreliable or unavailable.
Starlink has provided connections to Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion. Just last week Starlink connected a remote Tongan community that was still cut off after the tsunami in January. The company is considered the first major company to launch successive satellites on a scale this large.
“We’re talking about a fairly close formation in a very tight orbit, and this is because they want this global [broadband] coverage,” Tucker told Sydney Morning Herald. “They need to have the satellites flying in flight paths so the exact same points are covered every time.”
The more you know! I’m kinda glad I didn’t witness it. I would’ve thought it was some magical universal sign and manifested something dumb. But I hope everyone else’s wishes come true.
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