Incoming space junk a scientific opportunity

Well, that's in the Confirmed Hoaxes section of that page. :)

The N1 rocket (USSR's workhorse for their Lunar space program in the '60s) never worked well. Chief Engineer Korolev (the Russian counterpart to Wernher von Braun) dying in the mid-60s certainly didn't help. The project suffered from "financial malnutrition" for a long time, due to political infighting within the top levels of the Communist Party.

The N1 test launches were all rushed, improvised affairs that failed, sometimes spectacularly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_artificial_non-nuclear...

The way the project operated was, basically, "we don't have enough money to run horizontal burn tests properly, so we'll do it live, with a full-scale vertical launch". The results were what you would expect.

Main point is, the Russians didn't have a properly working vehicle in the '60s to reach Moon orbit. They were starting to figure out the issues with the N1 towards the end of the decade, but then Armstrong set foot on Luna and the rest is history. The N1 was cancelled quietly in the mid-70s.

Almost certainly one of the various artificial object we discarded in orbit around the sun. For a complete list of candidate objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_in_...

Because their orbits are so close to the Earth (essentially they're artificial near-Earth asteroids), they're periodically recaptured into quasi stable orbits around Earth. Example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/J002e3f_...

>The object is only 1 to 2 metres in size, and its trajectory shows that it has a low density, and is perhaps hollow. That suggests an artificial object, “a lost piece of space history that’s come back to haunt us”, says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It could be a spent rocket stage or paneling shed by a recent Moon mission. It is also possible that the debris dates back decades, perhaps even to the Apollo era. An object seen orbiting Earth in 2002 was eventually identified as a discarded segment of the Saturn V rocket that launched the second mission to land men on the Moon.

Ahh yes, the curious case of J002E3, aka the S-IVB stage of Apollo 12. The example orbit animation above is J002E3, actually! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J002E3

> "The object is only 1 to 2 metres in size, and its trajectory shows that it has a low density, and is perhaps hollow. That suggests an artificial object, “a lost piece of space history that’s come back to haunt us”, says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It could be a spent rocket stage or panelling shed by a recent Moon mission. It is also possible that the debris dates back decades, perhaps even to the Apollo era."

Probebly.