Last Night's Shower of Fire Wasn't a Meteor Shower. Instead...

SAN ANGELO, TX — The bright streaks filmed by several citizens in the San Angelo area last night were initially mistaken for a meteor shower but were actually the reentry of a falling satellite. A separate Trident II (D5) missile test earlier in the evening caused some confusion on social media.

Neither the U.S. Navy nor the Royal Navy has issued an official statement on the missile test, though navigational warnings were posted in advance for September 17-22. It occurred at approximately 6:25 p.m. CT from a submarine in the North Atlantic Ocean, roughly 450 km east of Cape Canaveral, Florida, near Puerto Rico. The unarmed missile, possibly carrying a hypersonic glide vehicle or other test payload, followed a suborbital trajectory toward a splashdown area off southern Africa. It was visible as a single bright, ascending streak from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and nearby Caribbean areas but had no connection to the later Texas sightings.

The Texas event happened about two hours later, between 8:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. CT, based on reports from witnesses across the state, including west central areas like San Angelo, Abilene, and the Big Country region. It was the uncontrolled atmospheric reentry of Starlink-20373, a SpaceX communications satellite launched in September 2023. As it fell back to Earth and burned up due to friction with the atmosphere, the satellite broke apart into multiple glowing fragments—often described as 5-7 separate bright objects or fireballs streaking silently across the sky, sometimes appearing green or orange.

This created the illusion of a coordinated "trail" of objects descending together, but it was a single disintegrating spacecraft rather than multiple independent meteors. The American Meteor Society logged over 40 reports of the sighting, primarily from Texas and Louisiana, with no confirmed ground impacts or debris recovery. Similar reentries of Starlink satellites have been observed in Texas before, such as in 2024.