'Lifetime phenomenon': Passengers witness SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch from plane window

As SpaceX conducted its milestone 200th orbital mission Friday, passengers seated on a commercial plane flying past Cape Canaveral in Florida witnessed the SpaceX rocket trailing in the sky. The footage shared by the TikTok user @chefpinkpr known by the name Nelito, a flight attendant, depicted the landmark sighting. “While working for my flight we witnessed this once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon!” wrote the flight attendant in the caption of the video that is now viral on social media. The visuals caught the SpaceX rocket launching from the vantage point of the space station into the sky. 

“My plane flew by Cape Canaveral and caught the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch!” the caption to the footage read. 

Users swarmed the footage to describe the launch as "phenomenal" “awesome” and “privileged” to watch among other reactions. “Oh there it goes, the smoke's billowing, wow," one said in the comments. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have to lift off," a pilot joked in the comments section. “That was awesome!” one other said. “That pilot waited his whole life to say ‘ladies and gentlemen we have a liftoff’" one other commenter said. “This is unbelievable… What are the chances of this?” another comment read. A user expressed wonder at the sight, saying, “we watched the launch nearby, saw your plane and said “wow the view they must have.”

SpaceX launches Falcon 9 for telecom company SES 

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from the Space Launch Complex 40 at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 5:48 p.m. EST (2248 GMT) on Friday. It remains unclear if the visual caught the same rocket's liftoff. The first stage of the rocket landed safely on a SpaceX drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean just under nine minutes after liftoff. The launch of the two satellites for the telecom company SES was the 200th mission of a SpaceX booster and the eighth flight of Elon Musk's SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

Four previous flights have already been launched to the International Space Station for NASA — two crewed and two uncrewed, according to SpaceX's description of the liftoff. The aerospace firm also launched the private Japanese Hakuto-R moon lander on Sunday, December 11 ahead of the SWOT water-monitoring satellite liftoff for NASA.