Cubans capture lights of International Space Station passing through island’s sky
From Havana, Cubans were able to capture the lights of the International Space Station during its passage through the island’s sky on the night of November 7. Reports indicated that the station, run by NASA, was within the coordinates of the Caribbean nation at around 11:35 p.m. Specifically, it was at a latitude of 23.2 N and a longitude of 82.3 W, passing at an altitude of 417 km and a speed of 27,590 km/h.
Residents in the west of the country also saw lights in the sky that some attributed to possible unidentified flying objects (UFOs) on Monday. However, it was actually the bright contrail from Falcon 9 rocket launched from Florida to put 21 Starlink satellites into orbit. An expert explained that the lights seen came from gases expelled by the rocket’s propellant engines during its return stage to Earth, leaving a trail of light as they passed through the Earth’s atmosphere.
The private company SpaceX launched the Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral to carry a new fleet of second-generation Starlink communications satellites into space, which will provide faster internet speeds to more users. The launch was made from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 6:13 p.m. local time (23:13 GMT). After separation, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket returned to Earth after 8 minutes of takeoff and landed on the unmanned platform “A Shortfall of Gravitas”, parked in the Atlantic Ocean.