SpaceX Tore a Hole in Earth’s Atmosphere, Again – And Yes, It’s a Problem

On 21 April 2025, skywatchers in Puerto Rico witnessed more than just a distant rocket launch — they saw the sky itself ripple with a rare and eerie glow. This phenomenon is also known as an Ionospheric Hole Effect or Ionospheric holes.

At approximately 8:48 p.m. EDT, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on its Bandwagon-3 rideshare mission. Just over ten minutes later, around 9:00 p.m., Frankie Lucena captured the rocket’s passage over Puerto Rico using a Sony A7s camera paired with a 50mm f/0.95 lens. What he recorded was stunning: a glowing red cone in the upper atmosphere, a phenomenon known as an “Ionospheric Hole Effect”.

Frankie Lucena noticed the reddish glow and contacted Stephen Hummel at the McDonald Observatory, SpaceWeather first reported. Hummel confirmed that the glow was caused by a 630 nm line emission, a hallmark of ionospheric disruption.

These glowing holes form when water vapour from rocket exhaust interacts with the ionosphere, reducing local ionization by up to 70% and carving a temporary cavity nearly 100 km long. The red light emitted is similar to the aurora borealis — but triggered by rocket chemistry rather than solar storms.

While beautiful, ionospheric holes can disrupt technologies we rely on every day. GPS signals and shortwave radio transmissions may experience momentary errors or outages as they pass through the disturbed region. Thankfully, these effects are brief, with the ionosphere naturally re-ionizing after sunrise.

Such phenomena were once rare, but as space launches increase, so too does the frequency of these humanmade auroras.