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Out-of-control SpaceX rocket on collision course with moon

Falcon 9 booster, launched from Florida in 2015 to deploy Deep Space Climate Observatory, has followed ‘chaotic’ orbit since

A SpaceX rocket is on a collision course with the moon after spending almost seven years hurtling through space, experts say.

But after completing a long burn of its engines and sending the NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory on its way to the Lagrange point – a gravity-neutral position four times further than the moon and in direct line with the sun – the rocket’s second stage became derelict.

high enough that it did not have enough fuel to return to Earth’s atmosphere but also “lacked the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system”

Space observers believe the rocket – about four metric tonnes of “space junk” – is on course to intersect with the moon at a velocity of about 2.58km/s in a matter of weeks.

Bill Gray, who writes software to track near-Earth objects, asteroids, minor planets, and comets, has said the Falcon 9’s upper stage will very likely hit the far side of the moon, near the equator, on 4 March.

close lunar flyby on January 5” but will make “a certain impact at March 4”.

NASA and SpaceX are investigating the delayed opening of a parachute on a cargo Dragon spacecraft that recently returned to Earth, an incident similar to one that took place on a Crew Dragon spacecraft last year.

a “known condition” seen in some previous tests.

NASA and SpaceX are reviewing the parachute data ahead of the Crew-4 launch, scheduled for mid-April, and the subsequent return of the Crew-3 Crew Dragon spacecraft currently at the station. A commercial Crew Dragon flight to the International Space Station, Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission, is scheduled for launch March 30, returning before the Crew-4 launch.

His comments were in response to a question about “normalization of deviance,” a concept where organizations ignore data that is out of normal bounds because it did not cause an immediate safety issue but which could post a longer-term hazard. Normalization of deviance was a factor in both the shuttle Challenger and Columbia accidents.

However, the lack of coverage continued even after cargo Dragon splashdowns moved to just off the Florida coast, the same location used for Crew Dragon splashdowns. NASA and SpaceX limited their coverage of the CRS-24 splashdown Jan. 24 to tweets and blog posts, without any photos or video. A NASA “Space to Ground” video about ISS activities, published Jan. 28, mentioned the splashdown but used file images from previous Dragon splashdowns.

“There is a real thirst out there for better understanding of what the agency is doing and, for some reason, the organization can’t seem to push that out the way we used to back in the shuttle days,” he said. “There seems to have been a marked decrease in the information flow.