How a SpaceX rocket ended up hurtling towards the Moon

Pallab GhoshScience correspondent The story began in January last year, when a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida carrying two lunar landers into space. The rocket's job was to fire its upper stage hard enough to send both landers out of Earth orbit and onto a path towards the Moon, and it succeeded. But the spent stage was left drifting in a long, looping orbit that swung it out towards the Moon and back again. Over the following 18 months, the gentle gravitational tug of the Earth, Moon