They may be able to sell the debris on eBay
A massive piece of
Elon Musk's spacecraft has fell down from the sky into a farmer's field in what could make him a very rich man.
Mick Miners went to investigate after his daughters said they heard a large bang near their property in New South Wales, Australia. The farmer soon discovered that pieces of the
SpaceX Crew 1 spacecraft had littered the area, so naturally, he called in an expert.
Australian National University expert Brad Tucker was called to the scene, where he confirmed that the debris was "definitely space junk which was part of the SpaceX Crew-1 trunk."
"SpaceX has this capsule that takes humans into space but there is a bottom part... so when the astronauts come back, they leave the bottom part in space before the capsule lands," he said on the radio on Monday,
according to the Mail Online.
https://twitter.com/SpaceGirlLina/status/1553255238936645632
Tucker said that the craft has been in space since November 2020 and is only starting to break from orbit. The original plan was to have the space junk "break apart and land in the ocean" after being broken apart by the Earth's atmosphere.
While Tucker's team did see "most pieces" land in the ocean, witnesses in New South Wales said they heard loud bangs and saw explosions as they hit the ground.
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Via Getty[/caption]
"From a distance, it looks like a tree almost, like a burnt tree, and then you get closer and you realise 'hey that's not right'," he said. "The Australian Space Agency is now handling it because there is actually a legal protocol... so technically it's still SpaceX's."
While Tucker assumes they don't want it back, given that it was originally supposed to sink into the ocean, he said that Space X could be required to pay the farmers for the parts that crashed on their land.
"However, if they are able to keep it, they have options including giving it to a museum, selling it on eBay," Tucker explained. "They get a little tidy sum for all the trouble they have been put through."
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