SpaceX rocket set for unintentional moon landing – well, a piece of it anyway

It's so much further advanced than anything anyone else is working on, does it really need to be on schedule? I feel like "on schedule" only pertains to non-research-intensive projects.

The later Apollo missions (13-17) deliberately crashed their 3rd stages into the moon, in part to provide a signal for the seismometer packages left at each of the landing sites. They hit the moon a little faster than the Falcon 9 2nd stage will hit (2.6km/s vs 2.43km/s for the new one).

All of those impact sites have been located but the last one wasn't pinpointed until 2016: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moon-mystery-solved-apollo-rock...

That article says that Rocket Lab is building the spacecraft designed by NASA. Blue Origin is just launching it.

Falcon Heavy launched a spacecraft that used a Mars gravity assist in 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(spacecraft) same with the Europa Clipper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper going to Jupiter

That's not irony, that's shallow thinking. If you want to "make life multiplanetary" you would do it by building a very large, reusable, refillable rocket that can land 100 tons on Mars.

Which is exactly what SpaceX is doing.

[p.s.: The drive to land on the moon makes sense in the context of "how can we fund colonizing Mars?" Starlink funded the initial development of Starship. Musk believes (rightly or wrongly) that data centers in orbit and on the moon can fund the next set of projects.]

From TFA:

> 2.43 kilometers a second, or 1.51 miles a second, or 5,400 miles an hour, or 8,700 kilometers an hour.

> There is, of course, no air and no sound on the Moon, so a "Mach number" doesn't really make sense. But if there were air, the speed would be about Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound.

"several times the speed of sound" is obviously just meant to mean really fast to earthlings in relation to their speed of sound.

What about giraffe lengths per second?

Well, there is a speed of sound on the moon. Sound does travel through the regolith. If you were standing on the moon you would indeed "hear" this impact as the sound moved up through your feet. It would sound/feel like standing beside a subwoofer.