No, no, not some flying saucer, I saw, what I thought to be a space shuttle launch yesterday afternoon. I was driving here in Miami at around 4:00 P.M., when my girlfriend and I saw something high up on the horizon. I’ve never seen a shuttle lift off, but I was told you can see them from Miami. Still, I checked CNN and the NASA website, and there’s no mention of a shuttle taking off yesterday.
I live about 5 miles from the airport, and am used to seeing planes flying overhead. This was far higher than the planes I’m used to seeing. It was so high up, I really couldn’t get a good look at it, but it didn’t really look like a plane. Anyone in the S. Florida area have any ideas?
Well was it going across the sky like high flying jets do, or was it going more vertical up into the clouds? Was the stream behind it HUGE or small like a regular jet?
Could have been a small shuttle launching from cape canaveral, putting a satelite or something into orbit…
Which direction? What did it look like? Which direction did it travel?
Space.com lists nothing for yesterday. On launch at Vandenberg on 12/15, one today in French Guiana.
May have been a meteor. Not all look like shooting stars. Some are yellower and larger flaming balls. at a great distance it might look like the plume of a distant rocket.
It definetly wasn’t a shuttle. The next shuttle launch is scheuled for Jan 16th and will take a spacehab module to the ISS.
However, they do launch a lot more than just the shuttle from the cape. Since I don’t see anything scheduled in Jonathan’s Space Report or anywhere else ( http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/jsr/jsr.html ) for the 17th, you probably saw a classified military launch, using a Delta or Titan launch vehicle. Either that, or the TDRS launch for the 5th was delayed, but don’t know about that, as I’m no longer in the loop on things of that nature.
Well, I’m 100% sure it wasn’t a comet, asteroid, etc. I watched it for a few minutes while stuck in traffic. It was defintely a vehicle of some kind. It had some plumes of smoke, but it was so far away, it’s hard to accurately describe if they were large or not. (and we all know that aliens travel in eco-friendly contraptions that emit no smoke, so I’m guessing it was human-made) It was travelling north or north by north-east, but since I was also looking out for the car in front of me, and since I have such a lousy memory for details, I can’t tell you much more. I’ll have to ask my girlfriend to see if she could describe it better.
It could very easily have been an ordinary commercial airplane. Sometimes, when they and/or their contrails reflect the sunlight properly, they can be astonishingly bright and non-airplane-looking.
I have seen two things like what you describe.
Once was a frozen vapor trail from a jet so high up it glowed with the son while everything else was dark… like a giant snake …
The Second was when the space shuttle had to dump water before landing - this was a a brilliant gold/white cloud that was painful to even look at.