At 6:09 p.m. on Feb. 10, Elon Musk’s astronautics company SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket over California from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The rocket’s trajectory went over the Claremont Colleges, giving students a front-row seat to the event.
The rocket will be part of the greater Starlink satellite constellation, which currently comprises 6,900 operational spacecrafts intending to deliver broadband internet services. This will be SpaceX’s 18th rocket of its kind launched.
Charlie Lambert HM ’26, a team leader for the Mudd Rocketry Club, addressed the significance of these launches. He emphasized the importance of satellite technology in our daily lives.
“There’s a lot that can be said about improving life here on Earth from launching satellites,” he said. “Every day, people use GPS on their phones, and that’s a satellite constellation that’s been around for quite a while now. Life would be very, very different if we didn’t have those kinds of constellations. You would not be able to do your everyday activities.”
The Feb. 10 launch is not as rare as it might seem. Last year, the Vandenberg Space Force Base achieved 51 launches, a milestone that hasn’t been reached since 1974.
“They happen so frequently that it’s a given that one is going to be happening every other day,” Lambert said. “It just so happens that sometimes, when they’re launching, you can see them go over our colleges.”
Chad McElroy CM ’26, an aerospace enthusiast, said that the timing of the launch — about an hour after sunset — created a visual around the rocket and its trail known as the “twilight effect.”
“The exhaust from the rocket engines catches the light of the sun after it has set from our perspective, really brightening it up,” McElroy said. “A lot of the dust or exhaust that is coming out of the rocket engines from the first stage and then the second stage catches the light, and it makes the launch appear even more dramatic.”
McElroy described the resulting effect as breathtaking.
“It starts to look even like a jellyfish,” he said. “The sun catches all those ice and dirt crystals from the exhaust of the rocket as it goes about its journey. The rocket is usually launching south, and you start to see the exhaust all the way into space, tracking it until it goes below the horizon.”
Katherine Lanzalotto CM ’25 and her friends unexpectedly found themselves watching the launch and the trail it left in the sky on their way home from dinner.
“Everyone kind of took a second and looked up at the sky and breathed and stopped thinking about whatever CMC forces them to think about all the time,” she said. “I found that incredibly cool, [be]cause I think there are very few moments where you just, you know, step back from it all.”
For McElroy, the event served as an escape as well as a source of inspiration. He reflected on the broader significance of space exploration.
“I saw it as the apex of what we as a species can accomplish, putting our creativity and our innovation and our drive to explore new heights,” aerospace enthusiast Chad McElroy CM ’26 said. “Finding and seeing instances like those launches, watching them online or keeping up with the news of them always helps brighten my day a little bit.”
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