10/06/2026
The mysterious bright smudge moving across our northern sky last night is fittingly described as a “space jellyfish” but you need to view such phenomena from the right angle to get the “jellyfish” likeness.
What we saw was high altitude rocket exhaust illumination – the rocket is hundreds of kms above and is still hit by sunlight, even though we were in darkness, making the frozen exhaust particles glow. The rocket fuel in this launch, as we found out, was liquid oxygen-methane.
Most of us in this part of the world get an entirely different view, and we don't immediately see a jellyfish, since rocket launches are a long way from us, generally in the northern hemisphere. By the time any effects of launch are in our sky it looks less like a jellyfish and more like a, well, a satellite that is alight, or a comet with a tail, or as we have also observed in past years, a blob!
Late yesterday, a Chinese rocket – Zhuque-2E Y6 – launched to deploy two satellites, for experimental broadband and “direct-to-cell” communications, for the Qianfan (Spacesail Constellation) and China Mobile. This is the rocket launch that created the visual “space jellyfish” last night. It was the 8th flight of the Zhuque (meaning “vermilion bird” – which has a big place in the Chinese reading of the night sky - we delve into Chinese astronomy in our China New Year sky shows).
According to the Global Times, it lifted off from Northwest China. With some time zone conversions it turns out we viewed the exhaust of the actual lift off – from way down the belly of Earth in the southern hemisphere. While it certainly was an extraordinary vantage point, this is why it is difficult to see the magnificent jellyfish-like motion through space.
What is Qianfan, Chinese for “Thousand Sails”? It is China’s premier low Earth orbit satellite internet mega constellation, an aerospace project that aims to directly compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network. These satellites don’t orbit at the same altitude. Starlink satellites orbit at about 550 km and Qianfan satellites orbit at about 800km.
Qianfan commenced its launches in 2024 and will, like Starlink, eventually have about 15,000 satellites in orbit.
Incidentally, as it turns out, there was a Starlink 10-35 launch prior to the ZhuQue-2E rocket. It carried 29 Starlink satellites into orbit. The Falcon 9 booster flew for a record-breaking 35th time. The 10 in the launch name refers to the Group 10 orbital shell – the destiny of the constellation deployment.
A great number of guests in one of our groups a few nights back saw the resultant constellation train – Starlink was your launch source!
Image credit: A view of a space jellyfish is shown by John Krauss, official mission photographer for the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission. It shows the Falcon 9 reusable rock launch in 2021. This mission took Jared Isaacman (now boss of NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and 3 others into space to orbit Earth, 15 times per day for three days.
