SpaceX seems to have mistaken shooting for the moon with shooting at the moon.
Forecast to occur on Aug. 5, a five-story-long piece of a rocket from one of the private space exploration company’s recent lunar missions is expected to hit the moon at around 5,400 miles per hour, around 24 times the speed of a Formula 1 racecar. As it currently stands, projections put the rocket’s crash course with the moon at 2:44 A.M. Eastern Time.
But what sounds like a disaster movie scenario will cause very little damage, experts said. The most that SpaceX’s rocket will do is create some flying moon rock and another lunar crater. Still, the incident raises concerns about the tradeoffs of handing over space launches to private companies that are increasingly dispatching more objects into space with few plans for how to deal with the space junk left behind, according to Anncy Thresher, an assistant professor of public policy, urban affairs and philosophy at Northeastern University.
“Infrastructure on the moon is currently sparse enough that we aren’t too worried about these kinds of uncontrolled impacts, but that will change in the future,” Thresher said. ”We need to be proactive now about how to regulate and remove space junk to avoid catastrophes going forward.”
