Rocket that will crash on moon is not from spacex but is Chinese

It can be, especially in space. Several weeks after an astronomer reported that a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket stage would crash on the Moon in early March, Bill Gray changed his mind on Sunday, multiple media reported. He now thinks it is a staircase of a Chinese launcher.

Media eagerly took to Gray’s announcement that a staircase from a Falcon-9 launch vehicle from SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company, would land on the Moon on March 4. The staircase is a remnant of the launch of NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory in 2015, it was said.

However, an engineer at NASA’s famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory sounded the alarm and informed Gray Saturday morning that the Falcon’s trajectory isn’t really close to the Moon. So it would be strange if the stairs were so close to plopping on the celestial body.

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Gray did his homework again and found a new possible “culprit”: a staircase from China’s Long March 3C that hurled China’s Chang’e-5-T1 toward the Moon in October 2014.

The launch time and trajectory correspond almost exactly to the orbit of the object that will hit Earth’s natural satellite.