Musk under fire as rogue SpaceX rocket on track to hit MOON – impact time predicted

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Experts have predicted that the spacecraft, which launched in 2015, will hit the Moon on March 4. The second stage of a Falcon 9 has been floating around in space for the past seven years in a somewhat chaotic orbit. In 2015, Mr Musk’s SpaceX launched its first ever deep space mission, carrying the Deep Space Climate Observatory on a million-mile journey.

After the Falcon 9 reached its transfer orbit, its second stage became obsolete as the space weather satellite began its journey to a Sun-Earth LaGrange point.

Since the rocket did not have enough fuel to take itself back to Earth, the four-tonne portion of the Falcon 9 continued in a chaotic orbit aorund the Earth.

Earlier this month, Bill Gray, an astronomer who writes the widely used Project Pluto software, called out for amateur and professional astronomers to make additional observations of the rocket and refine his calculations.

He wrote: “Space junk can be a little tricky. I have a fairly complete mathematical model of what the Earth, Moon, Sun, and planets are doing and how their gravity is affecting the object.

“I have a rough idea of how much sunlight is pushing outward on the object, gently pushing it away from the Sun.

“This usually enables me to make predictions with a good bit of confidence.

“With all the data, we’ve got a certain impact at March 4, 12:25:39, latitude +4.93, east longitude 233.20, plus or minus a few seconds and a few kilometers.”

Mr Gray noted that this is the first unintentional case of a rocket striking the Moon.

Mr Gray keeps track of about a dozen objects in “high”, near-moon orbits, and helps people differentiate between asteroids and space junk.

He said: “In theory, given enough time, such objects will either hit the earth, or the moon, or gain energy by passing the moon and be ejected into orbit around the sun. (That last happened to the booster for the Chang’e 2 mission last summer.)”

Mr Musk has previously faced sharp criticism for reckless use of satellites and space debris.

One person commented: “Bad enough we have his crappy cars on the road, now he has to litter on the moon too.”

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Another noted: “Sure, let’s start polluting our Moon for the fun of it.”

Nearly a month ago, Mr Musk faced the ire of Chinese citizens online after their space station was reportedly forced to take evasive actions to avoid collision with satellites.

Chinese citizens lashed out against the tech billionaire’s space ambitions on Monday after satellites from Starlink Internet Services, a division of Musk’s SpaceX aerospace company, had two “close encounters” with the Chinese space station.

According to a document submitted by China to the UN space agency, the incidents occurred on July 1 and October 21.

In the papers, Beijing complained about how the near-miss incident “constituted dangers to the life or health of astronauts aboard the China Space Station”.

It said: “For safety reasons, the China Space Station took the initiative to conduct an evasive manoeuvre in the evening of that day to avoid a potential collision between the two spacecraft.”

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