A SpaceX rocket is about to crash into the moon at thousands of miles per hour. Not on purpose. Just because someone forgot to bring it back.
The rocket finished its job years ago and has been floating around like a shopping cart in a Walmart parking lot ever since. Now gravity has other plans. Wednesday it hits the lunar surface and carves out a crater the size of several football fields.
Scientists are thrilled. They get to watch dust kick up and analyze what's underneath. Free excavation courtesy of Elon Musk's space junk. One man's orbital debris is another man's geology experiment.
The rocket weighs four tons. It's been drifting since 2015 when it launched a climate observation satellite. Did its job. Ran out of fuel. Never made it home. Spent seven years tumbling through the void until the moon's gravity said enough.
No one at SpaceX tracked it. No one planned for this. The company that wants to colonize Mars can't be bothered to remember where it parks. But sure, buy the dip on space exploration stocks because the future is inevitable and you're early.
Astronomers discovered the collision course by accident. They've been monitoring the rocket's trajectory for weeks. The impact happens on the far side of the moon where no one can watch it live. We'll get the data later. Maybe some photos if we're lucky. Mostly we'll get press releases about how this advances lunar science.
It does advance lunar science. That's the annoying part. Scientists will learn something useful from this four-ton projectile we abandoned in orbit. They'll measure the crater depth and study the debris field and publish papers about subsurface composition.
Meanwhile your Tesla shares are down because Elon got bored and bought Twitter, but at least his old rocket is contributing to academic research by f*cking up the moon.
Photo by Jan Baborák on Unsplash
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