This hasn’t been the greatest week for Elon Musk. First his SpaceX stock took a hit as its post-IPO lockup expired. Now one of his rockets likely crashed into the moon.
Early Wednesday morning, the discarded upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was due to slam into the moon at 5,400 miles per hour, more than twice the speed of a bullet, according to the New York Times. The scheduled time has now passed. So far, nobody has confirmed it actually happened.
Astronomer Bill Gray, who first predicted the collision, called the odds of spotting a visible flash or debris plume “quite iffy” beforehand. Reporter Kenneth Chang, who covered the story for the Times, said afterward there’d been no immediate reports of a flash, but noted that was expected anyway. Confirming the crash requires comparing before-and-after satellite photos of the impact site, which takes time. A Korean spacecraft, Danuri, is expected to pass over the site about eight hours after impact. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter won’t get there for six days.
But the physics leave little real doubt that the crash happened. As Chang says, nothing short of aliens shooting the rocket out of the sky could have knocked it off course.
This hasn’t been the greatest week for Elon Musk. First his SpaceX stock took a hit as its post-IPO lockup expired. Now one of his rockets likely crashed into the moon.
Early Wednesday morning, the discarded upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was due to slam into the moon at 5,400 miles per hour, more than twice the speed of a bullet, according to the New York Times. The scheduled time has now passed. So far, nobody has confirmed it actually happened.
Astronomer Bill Gray, who first predicted the collision, called the odds of spotting a visible flash or debris plume “quite iffy” beforehand. Reporter Kenneth Chang, who covered the story for the Times, said afterward there’d been no immediate reports of a flash, but noted that was expected anyway. Confirming the crash requires comparing before-and-after satellite photos of the impact site, which takes time. A Korean spacecraft, Danuri, is expected to pass over the site about eight hours after impact. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter won’t get there for six days.
But the physics leave little real doubt that the crash happened. As Chang says, nothing short of aliens shooting the rocket out of the sky could have knocked it off course.
