Originally published at: A SpaceX rocket stage will soon smash into the Moon | Boing Boing
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Now billionaires are trashing the Moon, what’s next, I axe yous.
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Mars, I’m guessing…
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obligs
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Do a backflip!
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Oh, great. Well, this is the end for the Moonosaurs, I guess.
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It’s likely that this will be the first time a piece of space hardware unintentionally strikes the Moon.
That’s a cute way to say space trash. A huge missed opportunity to spin this as ‘doing science by impacting the surface’
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This is a NASA mission on a NASA trajectory. So they’re the ones to blame, but we can’t do that, because trashing billionaires is what gets you the internet points.
It’s a 4 tonne piece of aluminum hitting with 3 tonnes of TNT worth of force. You’re not going to find any trash, just microscopic droplets of aluminum similar to the ones deposited by meteorites every day.
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How do you know, where you there?
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Well, it was nice knowing you all!
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Well, tell Elon we’ll see him on the dark side of the moon.
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So this is basically just an unintended side-effect of the NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory launch? (It created some junk that had to go somewhere.) And it’s a SpaceX rocket because that’s what NASA used? And we actually, unintentionally, get to do some useful science with it as a result? Cool.
Actually this sounds like it was neither intentional nor bad (nor even a SpaceX decision). Unlike a lot of other SpaceX-involved bullshit.
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That’s no moon!
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Can we get free plane tix or swanky hotel rooms with those?
Well, that’s more or less exactly what’s happening. I have a good physics-geek friend who works for Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. A few years age they worked on a different project with very similar goals - crash something into the moon so that the plume could be checked for signs of water and other things. Pretty cool stuff. I don’t recall how far their thing went but do remember that there was extensive discussion about the morality of the experiment, particularly the (admittedly small) potential to introduce earth biology.
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I’m speaking mostly that they didn’t intend for this to happen. Once they realized it was going to happen, they could have announced ‘it was the goal all along!’ instead of ‘oops, we might as well get some data’; I mean if they are going to twist the truth from ‘space trash’ into ‘space hardware’, not much more of a stretch to ‘we intended to make this a bonus mission!’
Ask papasan, he received 10 of them for his post.
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