All Aboard The Satellite Train!
Elon Musk’s latest venture has people rolling their eyes…upward
By kncitom on April 20, 2020
Last week one of our co-workers, Darik, who hosts the morning show at our sister KYMX, came by our studio breathlessly talking about some “satellite train” he’d witnessed in the sky the night before. Given that his station is adult contemporary, we assumed maybe he’d been listening to a little too much Dream Weaver so we nodded politely and everyone went on with their day.
Fast forward to Saturday night. My wife and I are in the backyard, enjoying our grown-up juice, and I remembered our conversation with Darik. So, expecting absolutely nothing, I craned my neck skyward.
Holy crap! He wasn’t lying.
Straight over our Roseville home, lined up in perfectly-spaced (no pun intended) order, were seven or 8 white dots, moving rapidly from –I’m bad with directions so I’ll say, the left side of our yard to the right. And they kept coming! About the time the lead one would fade from sight, another would materialize, and the chain kept going for at least 10 minutes, one after another after another, like watching headlights on an interstellar freeway. Another way to describe it? Like a cosmic version of an ellipsis. You know, these:
………………..
Only in the sky, directly overhead. It was amazing– and I’d say that even I wasn’t 3 glasses of grown-up juice in.
So, I had to look it up and, sure enough, Darik was right, it’s a thing, brought to us courtesy of Elon Musk. Apparently, it’s all part of his Space-X “Starlink” program, with a goal of eventually launching thousands of satellites into orbit in hopes of providing high speed internet coverage to all corners of the globe. Eventually, the satellites, which are about 23 miles up, will not be so bunched together and organized, and may even fade from view.
But for now, especially given that we have clearer skies due the quarantine, it’s a pretty amazing sight to behold. Read more about it and see a video in this piece from Newsweek magazine. Click here. And sometime this week after the sun goes down, tell Alexa to play Dream Weaver, grab a grown-up juice and head outside to have a look.
