While spending time on St Croix, I’ve seen some amazing things over the skies of the Virgin Islands this week. From military exercises with A-10 Warthogs, Apache Helicopters, and C-130 Gunship planes flying over St. Croix to the rare planetary alignment of Jupiter, Venus, and the Moon over the horizon, it’s been quite a week to stare up into the skies.
But the thing that had everyone talking was the SpaceX 9 launch which lit up the skies over the northern Caribbean on Monday night. There were lots of great photos capturing a curious phenomenon bursting into the evening sky, but also lots of speculation about what it could be. I mean, who doesn’t love a good alien invasion or Chinese spy effort story? But it wasn’t either of those things.
Nope, it was just SpaceX launching a batch of new Starlink satellites into orbit. Damn! As eager as I was for some out-of-this-world excitement, all I got were some more high-tech space toys being launched into the earth’s gamut.
But in all seriousness, it was pretty cool to witness such an event happening right above us. And even though there were public SpaceX announcements explaining what was going on, social media had plenty of hilarious speculation about intergalactic invasion and projections of new world order. Still very captivating nonetheless.
What’s even more interesting is that these new V2 Mini satellites have four times the communications capacity of earlier generations of Starlink satellites. So, who knows what kind of advancements we’ll see in technology thanks to this launch…
As a traveler who loves exploring new places and experiencing new things, witnessing something like this was definitely a pretty sweet memory to be added to my stay on the Virgin Islands. And while it wasn’t aliens or Chinese spy efforts (thank goodness!), it was still pretty darn cool to see it live.
Who knows what kind of advancements we’ll see in technology thanks to this launch? Maybe one day those satellites will be able to order us painkillers from The Boardwalk of St Croix. One can only imagine…