NASA Takes Detailed Photos of a Rocket Crash on the Moon, and No One Knows Who it Belonged To
I don't mean to sound like an alarmist in regards to this photo. Just because NASA is surprised to find a double crater appearing like a couple of over-easy eggs on the lunar surface is no reason we should be surprised, right? I mean, yes, they are literal rocket scientists. And the moon is by an order of magnitude the closest object in the universe to us - and more importantly, me - is no cause to panic. Why, I'm sure there are dumbbell-shaped spacecraft flying every which way around the solar system.
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So there's a simple explanation for this, right?
Wrong. No one has the faintest idea where this came from.
TechCrunch - [A]n unidentified rocket stage (!) impacted the lunar surface, forming a new and interesting crater and leaving us all wondering how it’s possible to not know what happened.
The short version of this story is that skywatchers led by Bill Gray had been tracking an object for months that, based on their calculations, would soon impact the moon. It was obviously a piece of rocket trash (rockets produce a ton of trash), but no one stepped up to say “yes, that’s ours, sorry about that.” …
[They] determined that it was likely a piece of a SpaceX launch vehicle from 2015. But SpaceX didn’t cop to it, and after a while Gray and others, including NASA, decided it was more likely to be the 2014 Chang’e 5-T1 launch out of China. China denied this is the case, saying the launch vehicle in question burned up on reentry. …
Perhaps we’ll never know, and really, that’s the weirdest part of all. With hundreds of terrestrial telescopes and radars, space-based sensor networks and cameras pointing every which way — and that’s just the space monitoring we know about! — it seems amazing that a whole rocket stage managed to sit in orbit for six or seven years, eventually getting all the way to the moon, without being identified.
Let's acknowledge that space probes have been slammed into the lunar surface before, but intentionally. For geological testing and other scientific research. These have occurred after years of research, millions of dollars of funding, and hours upon hours of super hard Newtonian calculations by brainiacs.
That is not what occurred here. Not by a damned site. Rogue pieces of rocket debris don't simply careen out of Earth orbit and hit a trillion-to-one bullseye on the moon. It wasn't Elon Musk. It wasn't the Chinese. It wasn't Doctor Evil. And the smart people who have dedicated their superior intellects to knowing about such things do not know. They're shrugging their lab-coatted shoulders, facing their palms toward the ceiling and doing the same "Ahdunno" that morons like me and beautiful, lovable, smart people who read my posts are.
Not that I'm saying this is the work of someone from beyond our world. That it's all part of an operation to establish a base of operations where they can easily attack us because they know there's not a damned thing we can do about it because our scientists can't even figure out the crater situation. But I'm not saying it's not that, either. It could also be a supervillain with the power to fire missiles into the lunar dust. And I don't know which proposition is scarier. Either way, we are so doomed.