00:00Well, Jonathan McDowell is an astrophysicist and space sustainability analyst based in London.
00:05Jonathan, welcome. I can understand how you could reverse your car into another in the car park.
00:12How does a rocket end up crashing into the moon?
00:15Right, well, you know, normally when a satellite is launched, the rocket is often left in orbit and it just
00:22orbits the Earth happily.
00:23But when you send a moon lander to the moon, the rocket that delivers it gets left in a very
00:29high orbit that's so high that the moon's gravity tugs on it every month as the moon comes around.
00:35And it's very hard to predict where it's going to end up.
00:38In this particular case, the moon tugged on it one too many times and the rocket ended up crashing into
00:45the moon.
00:45And so this is unfortunate. It's not a huge deal because it won't cause any big problems for the stuff
00:54currently on the moon.
00:55But we want to avoid this in future when there are lots of astronauts on the moon and lots of
00:59scientific experiments on the moon.
01:01So could SpaceX have prevented this from happening?
01:05Yes, easily. And they have prevented it for the next two launches that they did since that one by giving
01:13their rocket stage after it delivers its cargo a little extra push, a little extra burn of the rocket that
01:19sends it instead of it to orbit around the Earth and the moon, it goes into orbit around the sun
01:24where it won't hit into anything.
01:26And so that's what they should have done this time.
01:29They just didn't think of it, I think.
01:31And we're starting to become more aware and more sensitive of where we leave our junk out in deep space
01:38as the amount of traffic there is drastically increasing.
01:42Now, my understanding is the impact was not directly seen.
01:48How can scientists confirm exactly where and what happened?
01:53Well, we've been tracking the object with telescopes.
01:57We saw it as late as yesterday, exactly on the orbit that we've calculated.
02:01And so Sir Isaac Newton tells us with 100 percent confidence, we know that if it's falling that way that
02:08fast, it's going to hit the moon.
02:10There's no way it can dodge.
02:12And so, you know, this is something that we understand very well.
02:16It's not the first time this has happened.
02:18A Chinese rocket crashed into the moon in 2022 in very similar circumstances.
02:22So we're getting used to seeing this.
02:24We'd like to see less of it in future.
02:27Jonathan, good to talk to you.
02:28And thank you very much for that.
02:30Jonathan McDowell, the astrophysicist.
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