It’s not every day a truck the length of nine school buses rolls through town. But it did yesterday.

The endlessly long, black cylindrical truck and white cab — as long as the One Arizona Center skyscraper in downtown Phoenix is tall — miraculously cleared a 90-degree turn onto John Wayne Parkway with the help of a state trooper escort team.

Did you see it?

Officials at the scene said the truck’s cargo was confidential. But Arizona Department of Transportation spokesperson Garin Groff later confirmed the oversized loads traveling through Maricopa yesterday were SpaceX rockets.

“We had quite a few oversized loads moving through the area,” he said. “This [was] a SpaceX first stage empty rocket, en route from New Mexico to California.”

The rocket moved through town just after noon, traveling down Honeycutt Road and John Wayne Parkway before leaving town.

This isn’t the first time a SpaceX rocket cruised through the city on its way to lift off. In 2022, crews transported rockets in the early morning hours in June and September that year.

The next SpaceX launch is scheduled to begin tonight at 9:11 p.m. local time from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, about two hours northwest of Los Angeles. This involves a Falcon 9 rocket, which measures approximately 229 feet in length and 12 feet wide.

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