What you don’t like, you would like to shoot on the moon. This simple saying will Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX currently to the program, simply because there is no other way.
SpaceX rocket against its will on a collision course
Billionaire Elon Musk’s company is actually known for the fact that SpaceX’s rockets can be reused. Above all, the company wants to prevent an exponentially growing mountain of space debris in our near-earth orbit.
The lower segment of a rocket usually lands on purpose-built landing pads. However, even with SpaceX, the upper part is simply ejected in the classic way, as it was in the golden early days of space travel, and should at best burn up when it enters the earth’s atmosphere.
As the Frankfurter Rundschau reports, this plan did not go according to plan for a rocket. This is a rocket launch that Elon Musk has probably long forgotten in 2015. At that time, SpaceX transported the “Deep Space Climate Observatory” (DSCOVR) satellite into space for the US weather and oceanographic agency NOAA. The Falcon 9 rocket completed SpaceX’s first real space mission.
Collision course moon confirmed
The catch was that the satellite had to leave low-Earth orbit far behind. The second stage of the “Falcon 9” had to carry the flying observatory further into space. On a maiden flight, it was forgiven that this second module of the rocket no longer had enough fuel for the return journey.
And so the “Falcon 9” shot into space by SpaceX is still spinning between the earth and the moon today. While it poses no threat to our satellites, the moon will likely have to pay the price. A new calculation shows that the rocket part will probably hit our satellite in March. With that, SpaceX would at least have solved the problem with the space debris in our orbit, because, as is well known, there is still a lot of space on the moon.
Source: Frankfurter Rundschau