science<\/p>\n
Before and after shots of Elon’s ejecta snapped by Danuri<\/p>\n
The race for the first before-and-after images of the spent SpaceX rocket on the Moon has been won by the South Korean space agency.<\/p>\n
The Korean Aerospace Administration (KASA) posted imagery <\/a>from its Danuri lunar orbiter showing the impact site on the Moon on August 6. <\/p>\n The impact was predicted<\/a> to occur on August 5, and marked a landing on the Moon for SpaceX several years ahead of schedule, just without humans onboard and traveling a good deal faster than planned.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Humanity trashed Earth orbit \u2013 next stop the Moon<\/p>\n \n READ MORE\n<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The words “crater” and “SpaceX” are not something investors nervously tracking the company’s stock price following the weeks since its IPO will want to think about.<\/p>\n The impact came on the fourth anniversary of Danuri’s launch<\/a>, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It took a few months for the probe to reach the Moon, and its initial one-year mission has since been extended twice \u2013 most recently through 2027. The plan<\/a> is currently for Danuri to intentionally make its own impact crater in March 2028.<\/p>\n The upper stage of the Falcon 9 is expendable, and this one was used to send Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace’s RESILIENCE to the Moon in 2025. On most Falcon 9 missions, the upper stage burns up in Earth’s atmosphere, but a lunar transfer orbit like this one made that impossible. In a post<\/a>, SpaceX stated, “Impacts like this are rare, but they can happen with objects in these types of orbits, and we worked with NASA on the optimal disposal solution,” and wrote, “a controlled disposal maneuver is not always possible.”<\/p>\n