I tried looking for it last night but unfortunately there is far too much light pollution.
A brightness of +5.7 is really only possible to see in perfectly dark skies. Even then, about half the time you cant be sure if you really saw it.
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Every year the brightness of the city gets worse. I think that to see a really dark sky, you have to travel for hours to the sugar cane plantations in the north of Rio. From my window I can only see the planets and the brightest stars among the glow of the city lights.
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And that’s it for the Mars Relay Network.
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They had another nozzle failure during a test fire in 2019. Root cause ended up being the ground test setup causing a failure mode that wouldn’t (couldn’t) happen in flight. Maybe they made a similar error with this rocket.
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Well, that’s weird… we just had one of those over GA…
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Normally when someone reports that they saw a fireball and heard it those claims arent correlated because the observed fireballs are so high that sound wouldn’t reach the observers ears. In this case though it appears to be really low, and the observers may have heard a sonic boom.
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Yeah, yeah… same people, people saw it, and felt it… Weird that these happened so close together timewise, but in different places?
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It’s not just Musk. The official budget request from the White House proposed phasing out the SLS:
$2.6B of this funding is earmarked for the Lunar Gateway space station. Which is completely unnecessary for moon missions and probably could never be built for that price in the first place. (Each SLS launch costs more than $2B on its own so how do they plan to get it up there?)
But Congressmembers with big aerospace contractors in their districts have their own logic, I suppose.
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Around a dozen fireballs per day (night) is typical.
Some things that affect reporting are time of day, whether the fireball crosses a heavily populated area, and whether people are out and about at the time.
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Oh, did not know that!
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It poses no threat to Earth and, unfortunately, it appears that our planet will be on the opposite side of the Sun when the object makes its closest approach.
Seems we should still be able to get some pretty damn good data on this one!
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