SpaceX Over Long Island — A Falcon 9 Morning

Long Islanders willing to get up before dawn were treated to an unusual sight this morning as a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying another group of Starlink satellites climbed into orbit, becoming visible along the East Coast shortly after its launch from Florida.

I photographed the rocket as it passed near Fire Island, its exhaust plume illuminated high above the Earth while the landscape below was still in the darkness of early morning.

The sight has become increasingly familiar, but the technology behind it represents a remarkable change in spaceflight.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 first flew in 2010 and was designed around an idea that once seemed almost impossible — instead of throwing away a rocket after every launch, bring major portions of it back and fly them again. In December 2015, SpaceX successfully landed a Falcon 9 first-stage booster after an orbital mission, and in 2017 it successfully flew a previously used orbital-class booster for the first time.

Today, the Falcon 9's first stage — the large booster containing its nine Merlin engines — routinely separates from the second stage and returns to Earth. Depending upon the mission, it can land either near the launch site or on an autonomous drone ship stationed hundreds of miles offshore. SpaceX also recovers and reuses portions of the rocket's payload fairing, the protective shell surrounding the satellites during launch.

That reusability has helped make possible the extraordinary launch rate needed to build Starlink, SpaceX's network of thousands of satellites in low-Earth orbit designed to provide high-speed, low-latency Internet service. The first Starlink satellites were launched in 2019, and within just a few years the system had grown into the world's largest low-Earth-orbit satellite constellation.

So while what appeared over Fire Island this morning lasted only a few minutes, it was part of something much larger — a transformation in spaceflight in which launching a rocket, recovering much of it and preparing it to fly again is increasingly becoming routine.

And for a photographer standing beneath that flight path before sunrise, it made for one heck of a morning.

                                                    Story and Photo by Fred Greco