That article says that Rocket Lab is building the spacecraft designed by NASA. Blue Origin is just launching it.

Falcon Heavy launched a spacecraft that used a Mars gravity assist in 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(spacecraft) same with the Europa Clipper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper going to Jupiter

The later Apollo missions (13-17) deliberately crashed their 3rd stages into the moon, in part to provide a signal for the seismometer packages left at each of the landing sites. They hit the moon a little faster than the Falcon 9 2nd stage will hit (2.6km/s vs 2.43km/s for the new one).

All of those impact sites have been located but the last one wasn't pinpointed until 2016: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moon-mystery-solved-apollo-rock...

"several times the speed of sound" is obviously just meant to mean really fast to earthlings in relation to their speed of sound.

From TFA:

> 2.43 kilometers a second, or 1.51 miles a second, or 5,400 miles an hour, or 8,700 kilometers an hour.

> There is, of course, no air and no sound on the Moon, so a "Mach number" doesn't really make sense. But if there were air, the speed would be about Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound.

What about giraffe lengths per second?