At 7:12 p.m. yesterday, residents across Maricopa stepped outside to cooler evening air, the din of Sunday night football and the streak of a SpaceX rocket cutting across the dusk, its payload a bright point leading the way.

“I freaked out,” Desert Cedars resident Elizabeth Dominick said after the rocket left a brushstroke in the sky over her street. “It disappeared as fast as it appeared.” 

“Such an awesome sight to see,” said Mary Nikolai-Eves, a Homestead resident. Lolita García of Acacia Crossings described it as a “beautiful event.”

The sight was SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which lifted off at 7:04 p.m. from Vandenberg Space Force Base near Santa Barbara, Calif., 502 miles to the west. The launch placed 28 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit, adding to a constellation that now numbers more than 8,500 active satellites, according to the post about the launch. 

According to SpaceX, this was the 28th flight for the first-stage booster, which has also supported NASA’s Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, the DART asteroid mission and multiple Department of Defense and Starlink flights. The booster successfully landed on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You in the Pacific Ocean. 

The company noted that residents of Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Ventura Counties in California could hear sonic booms depending on weather conditions. 

The next mission, Starlink Group 11-39, is scheduled for this Friday between 6 and 10 a.m. SpaceX rockets bound for Vandenberg by ground travel directly through Maricopa.