I’ve had email from a missile expert from White Sands, saying it is a missile. The swirl effect of the contrail is the corkscrewing of the missile, which is later corrected in flight.
The corkscrew effect is generated by wingtip vortices. You can see it clearly when aircraft are a high angles of attack in saturated air.
Ah, yes. The good old "corkscrew effect." Somehow that has become accepted as "characteristic" of rocket launches. It's bullshit.
Suffice it to say that rockets under proper guidance do not go corkscrewing through the air after launch.
Not to say that it never happens....
Compressed camera zoom, angle, and wind all combined to give that look.
I live in the Albuquerque area. Just this last Saturday, I was driving around and watching the skies (and the road). To my east were the Sandia Mountains. They top out just over 10,000 feet. We were getting winds to the east of the mountains, but west was fairly calm.
Just above the mountains, there was a contrail from a west-bound jet. Given the winds from the weather east of the mountains, the contrail was spreading more rapidly than normal, and the effect was to give it a cork-screw look. I wish I'd had a camera with me.