Looks like I just had my first “UFO” experience. And I mean UFO as in “unidentified flying object” - not “WTF alien mothashipz!!1!”. About an hour ago, around midnight, I saw two seperate orange lights moving in a curved path across the sky. I saw both seperately about five minutes apart, each visible for about 20 seconds.

The lights were bright orange, no flashing or pulsating but flickering slightly like stars do. Definitely moving too fast to be airplanes but too slowly to be meteors, they moved across the sky at approximately the same speed as the faint specs of satellites when seen on a clear and dark night. I’m pretty sure both moved across the same stretch of sky, though I can’t be 100% sure because I saw the first one from a moving car. Both slowly faded out before disappearing.

Ruling out airplanes (too fast), helicopters (no noise at all) and meteors (too slow), the only rational theory I can come up with is that sunlight was being refracted through the atmosphere and happened to be reflecting off the solar panels of satellites at exactly the right angle for them to glow bright orange.

In any case, the experience was very weird indeed.

I just read that the White Knight 2, mothership and launch vehicle for the soon to be unveiled SpaceShipTwo has been presented to the public, including some pretty nice photos (Spacefellowship.com). I have no illusions about actually being able to afford a trip to space with this baby, but I am sure as hell going to keep up to date on its activity. As far as I’m concerned, commercial space flight is one of the most important endeavors of the 21st century. Projects like this one could spark a new era in space travel, perhaps even giving mere mortals such as myself a chance at seeing the Earth from orbit some day…