At 7:12 p.m. yesterday, residents across Maricopa stepped outside to cooler evening air, the din of Sunday night football and t he streak of a SpaceX rocket cut 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 num

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