The now widely popular SpaceX disturbingly has one of it’s rockets on a collision course with the moon. The rocket was launched seven years ago and could potentially be the cause of devastation.
According to Ars Technica, a SpaceX rocket launched 7 years earlier seems to be on a collision course with the moon.
The Falcon 9 rocket performed an interplanetary journey to deploy a space weather satellite to a Sun-Earth LaGrange point roughly 900,000 miles from Earth, which was launched from Florida in early 2015.
The rocket’s second phase, however, managed to run out of fuel upon finishing the mission and placing NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory into deep orbit, but has been in an erratic orbit since that.
The Falcon 9 rocket might strike the moon’s far side, closer to the equator, in early March, according to Bill Gray, who creates algorithms to monitor near-Earth objects.
The Falcon 9’s second phase “made a close lunar flyby on January 5” and it will achieve “a certain impact on March 4,” according to Gray in a blog post.
“This is the first unintentional case [of space junk hitting the moon] of which I am aware,” Gray added.
The Falcon 9’s second stage, measuring four tons, will hit the moon at a speed of around 2.58 kilometers per second.
Gray is still uncertain of the precise hit area. Since “the bulk of the moon is in the way, and even if it were on the near side, the impact occurs a couple of days after New Moon,” he noted, the crash may not even be noticeable from Earth.
If governments and tech corporations desire to build moon bases, we can already see potential issues, such as the threat of space trash jeopardizing operations.
Is this to say that future moon bases will require laser weapon systems to avoid collisions with space debris?
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More make-believe space stories.
Sounds like a cover story for researching the dark side of the moon near the equator where it is warm and would likely harbor life.
If the moon nazis don’t shoot it down first.