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

bbeardyw about 13 hours ago 18 commentsRead Article on theregister.com

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the_king•37 minutes ago

I cannot wait for Starship to become a real thing, but you have to admit it's way behind schedule. The engines are awesome now.

eagerpace•11 minutes ago

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.

estearum•5 minutes ago

More bigger != more advanced != more economical != more sensical

And anyway yes there are programs that are dependent on Starship working on a schedule. If it doesn't work on schedule, those programs will advance without it and the Starship program will eventually fail.

LeoPanthera•about 2 hours ago

"List of artificial objects on the Moon"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_...

It's a lot more than you might think, and I couldn't find a comprehensive list of the non-spacecraft objects, some of which are hinted at in the first paragraph.

Polizeiposaune•about 2 hours ago

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...

flockonus•about 1 hour ago

Curious to see if to what intensity the Moon will "ring like a bell" at this one.

ref: https://books.google.ie/books?id=6QAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56&lpg=PA...

anticensor•about 3 hours ago

Let's make it intentional and controlled then.

trueno•about 3 hours ago

inb4 wreckage on the moon that stays there forever

spwa4•about 2 hours ago

What I think is very ironic is that Blue Origin actually beat SpaceX to Mars, after a decade of SpaceX "make life multiplanetary". A few months after Blue Origin did that SpaceX announced now they'll just go to the Moon, no more Mars.

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-blue-origin-launch-tw...

dmix•about 2 hours ago

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

dylan604•about 1 hour ago

They also launched the roadster that has an orbital radius out to the distance of Mars

GMoromisato•about 1 hour ago

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.]

drivebyhooting•about 2 hours ago

Several times the speed of sound? That is meaningless when there is no media for the sound waves. I think a better unit might be furlongs per fortnight.

ambicapter•about 1 hour ago

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.

roelschroeven•about 1 hour ago

"If there were air". Air at which temperature though? Th sound of speed, and hence what Mach numbers mean, depends on the temperature of the air. The temperature air would have at the moon's surface? By day or by night? Or the air at Earth's surface? Or at some other altitude?

hgoel•about 1 hour ago

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

jghn•about 1 hour ago

What about giraffe lengths per second?

sandworm101•about 1 hour ago

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.