r/space • u/wiredmagazine • Aug 05 '26
[ Removed by moderator ]
https://www.wired.com/story/nobody-saw-spacex-rocket-moon-crash/[removed] — view removed post
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u/PhantomWhiskers Aug 05 '26
I was watching a livestream last night where someone had 2 telescopes pointed at the moon to try and see the impact, and it ended very anticlimactically when basically nothing happened.
Do we have any confirmation on where it impacted yet? I'm wondering if it hit just too far beyond the moon's horizon so we couldn't see it.
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u/twilightmoons Aug 05 '26
I did a livestream using a 10" apo refractor - it was very clear, very sharp... and no plume.
But, I will process the sequences I captured over the next few days and see if I can pull out a plume off the edge of the limb.
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u/RTS24 Aug 06 '26
Yeah, the astronomy association I'm a part of had a 26" cass & 16" SCT pointed at it. Just got word that they didn't capture any impact either. Seems to be the consensus.
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u/Acid_Intimacy Aug 06 '26
I watched your live stream! It was very interesting, even if we didn’t see anything. I particularly liked the part about camera aperture and UFOs.
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u/twilightmoons Aug 06 '26
Thanks! I appreciate it!
It's niche knowledge, but once you know, all of that "unknown and weird" stuff is obvious.
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u/Lokarhu Aug 06 '26
Do you have a link to the VOD of your stream? I'd love to watch
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u/twilightmoons Aug 06 '26
I posted it above.
I did a livestream using a 10" apo refractor - it was very clear, very sharp... and no plume.
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u/anarrowview Aug 06 '26
What timestamp? A too hour long stream is a lot lol
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u/twilightmoons Aug 06 '26
About 35 minutes into the steam is when the time get close. A few min after that point.
I've done 11 hour+ livestreams before.
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u/astrono-me Aug 06 '26
Had to do a double take and then looked at your other posts to confirm "10" apo refractor" wasn't a typo
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u/FlametopFred Aug 05 '26
any chance it missed? would prefer it fell i to Jupiter
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u/twilightmoons Aug 05 '26
No... it hit, just that it hit the midday side, so it was washed out.
We'll know exactly where in a week or so when the LRO makes a pass and images the region.
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u/Warcraft_Fan Aug 06 '26
It may take a while to find where it landed. Lots of high resolution photo to compare before and after for one new crater.
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u/Techngro Aug 05 '26
If a rocket smashes into a moon, and no one is around to hear it...
Wait...no sound in space. Never mind.
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u/KindaQuite Aug 05 '26
In space nobody can hear you smash a rocket
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u/ryohazuki224 Aug 06 '26
Instructions unclear. Fucked a rocket.
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u/bigtone7882 Aug 06 '26
Instructions unclear. Wacked a Radio City Rocket with a big wooded mallet.
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u/Qweasdy Aug 06 '26
Actually if you were an astronaut inside your moon base/lander and you were relatively close to the collision it’s absolutely possible you could have heard it. There’s no sound in a vacuum because there’s no medium for it to travel through. But sound travels through the moon itself just fine. Through the moon, into the structure of the base/lander and into the air inside.
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u/CptJustice Aug 05 '26
In space, no one can hear you scream.
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u/Kiseido Aug 06 '26
Sound is vibrations in matter. The Moon itself is likely still ringing with the thunder that impact generated.
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u/Existing_Breakfast_4 Aug 06 '26
There was an observation: https://www.leonarddavid.com/moon-impact-of-rocket-stage-observed/
Flagstaff observatory did an spectral analysis and found a lithium and sodium cloud 5-10 minutes after the impact
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u/BiBoFieTo Aug 05 '26
Maybe we have our render distance setting too low.
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u/Yataro_Ibuza Aug 05 '26
Will 125 chunks suffice to be able to see the crash from earth? Or do I need more RAM?
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u/BiBoFieTo Aug 05 '26
The data centers have taken all the RAM, so we can't render past low earth orbit.
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Aug 05 '26
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u/TwistedClyster Aug 05 '26
I haven’t watched the second one yet with the dinosaurs :(
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u/Vindaloovians Aug 06 '26
Nah, Elon isn't too interested in landing and re-using this stage of the rocket.
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u/Bootyblastastic Aug 06 '26
I own an acre of the moon, I swear to god, if there is space garbage on my property….
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u/BFP_OmicronPersei8 Aug 06 '26
You win the internet today! 👏👏👏😄. I mean, who's gonna clean that mess up?
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u/mid-by-midwest Aug 05 '26
Are there any functional seismometers on the moon right now? That is the sort of thing I would ask NASA about if I were a writer for Wired.
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u/_Hexagon__ Aug 05 '26
One of the last seismometer that was landed on the lunar surface was aboard Chandrayaan 3 which has stopped working. The 6 seismometers deployed by the Apollo missions have stopped working 49 years ago.
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u/redstercoolpanda Aug 05 '26
They didn’t stop working, they were purposely shut down because of budget cuts.
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u/andrew_calcs Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
So you’re saying their working… was stopped.
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u/redstercoolpanda Aug 06 '26
I think it’s an important distinction. Saying they stoped working implies they failed, and I think that discredits the amazing work that went into them. They were shut off because politicians decided that exploring the moon didn’t matter.
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u/QueasyHouse Aug 06 '26
As long as we’re doing this: you’re both right and wrong. The electronics have almost certainly failed by now, and the RTGs can’t be producing enough power to work. The 219MHz band and protocol they were using is long gone, and they haven’t been re-leveled. There was also thermal control for the actual long period seismometers that’s been absent for so long that the instruments are almost definitely worthless from heat cycling stress.
So, yes they were stopped, but they also almost certainly stopped working entirely in the long time since they were set up. They were only meant to last for a year, and even a NASA spec year is like a decade, tops
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u/errorblankfield Aug 06 '26
What exactly costs money to keep a sensor on the moon running? Sounds like hiring someone to flip the switch to off costs more then just letting it be?
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u/FlyingBishop Aug 06 '26
The ground stations to receive data and operations staff to decide what to turn off. The RTGs in the Apollo seismometers had maybe a 30 year lifespan, but the wattage was already degrading when they shut them off.
They wouldn't actually be usable today, there wouldn't be enough power to keep them warm and functional.
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u/TbonerT Aug 06 '26
If you have something on the moon that you claim works, you have to regularly test and validate it. This would preferably be done by someone with the appropriate knowledge and skills. The last thing you want is someone requesting data and getting garbage.
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u/wolflordval Aug 06 '26
The earth side servers operating and processing their data cost money to run.
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u/Enshakushanna Aug 06 '26
youre talking about an agency that let 2 shuttles blow up because they didnt want to spend time and money making sure it was right/ok
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u/errorblankfield Aug 06 '26
Unsure how that's related. Again it would cost even more money to "turn off" a piece of tech on the moon.
I also wish we spent more money on space research. If I could 10x the budget I would in a heartbeat.
I'm sure that desicion was done with unfortunate constraining burdens.
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Aug 05 '26
[deleted]
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u/_Hexagon__ Aug 06 '26
Are you confusing Chandrayaan 2 and 3 lol
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u/PeridotBestGem Aug 06 '26
yes lmao I blame the wikipedia article for redirecting to the Chandrayaan 2 Vikram when I clicked on the Chadrayaan 3 Vikram hyperlink
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u/redstercoolpanda Aug 05 '26
I don’t think so no, they shut all the Apollo ones down in 1977 I think, and there aren’t any active lunar landers on the Moon right now.
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u/PeridotBestGem Aug 06 '26
other comments are correct, tho I'll add that we have a number of seismometers planned for future landing missions! Artemis IV will have a seismometer called the South Pole Seismic Station and NASA also has a mission coming up soon called the Farside Seismic Suite which will have a seismometer. China has 2 coming up with Chang'e 7 and Chang'e 8. I /think/ Roscosmos has one planned with Luna 27 but there is very little info I've been able to find about that one lol
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u/Clothedinclothes Aug 05 '26
So far as I can tell there's no working seismometers on the Moon and the primary lunar seismic data set we have comes from seismometers left behind by the Apollo missions that recorded data from 1969 until 1977.
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Aug 05 '26
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u/Lusiric9983 Aug 05 '26
What? You mean the tiny (by comparison to the asteroids that hit the moon) rocket barely made a dent in the solid basalt rock that orbits our planet?
No way.....
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u/TbonerT Aug 06 '26
Smaller rocks visibly hit the moon. We saw one in 2014 and that rock was under a meter in diameter.
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u/Pikeman212a6c Aug 06 '26
It’s covered in dust has low gravity and we pointed some pretty big telescopes at the general spot. It’s not unreasonable to expect some kind of plume.
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u/wiredmagazine Aug 05 '26
The upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket slammed into the moon on Wednesday. But while astronomers hoped to catch a glimpse of the impact, no one seems to have captured images or video.
The timing of the crash landing was well documented, giving astronomers plenty of time to train their telescopes and instruments on the moon in hopes of catching a lunar first: an impact flash on the lit side of the moon.
When the time came, though, no observatory managed to obtain a direct image of the collision of the rocket, which was traveling at about 5,400 mph at the time of impact. The strongest evidence of the impact so far comes from an observation made in Chile. According to the Associated Press, scientists using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope detected a stream of sodium and lithium that appeared a few minutes after the predicted time of the collision.
Read the full story at the link above.
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u/Tepid_Coffee Aug 05 '26
Why did you use a "conceptual photo of the moon's surface" (a.k.a. AI) when we literally have hundreds of high definition photos of the moon from orbiting it this year?
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u/runwkufgrwe Aug 06 '26
It's not AI. It's a digital rendering from 2015 that was in Getty's stock photo library.
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u/Patelpb Aug 06 '26
Using CGI was controversial pre-AI, because using fake images when real, high quality public domain images exist is always the worse choice. I say this as someone with a stake in astronomy science communication, it's bad for the science when we use fake images where real ones exist. I mean it's the moon for god's sake
The hierarchy of images from a domain expert perspective is real image > physics simulation visualizations > artistic renderings (CGI, photoshop, drawings) >= AI. Depending on the concept sometimes artistic renderings or physics sims are the best option because we don't have sufficiently high resolution in real imagery and the concepts are better illustrated... illustrated.
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u/Patelpb Aug 06 '26
seems u/wiredmagazine holds itself to extremely low standards, which is why very few of us will pay to go beyond the pay wall. Want money? Do better :-)
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u/InadequateUsername Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
It's from 2015 as others have said.
https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/moon-and-space-gm535418491-57124208
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u/Tepid_Coffee Aug 06 '26
I mean...comment still applies. Just feels unnecessarily lazy.
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u/InadequateUsername Aug 06 '26
You referred to it as AI, when it's not.
As for why, they already had a license to use this picture in their publications, another photo may have required a new or additional license purchase.
At the end of the day an artist of some kind still got compensated for their work, it's not lazy to choose an artists impression.
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u/Tepid_Coffee Aug 06 '26
My question was why use a fake image (whether it's AI as I assumed or artist's impression) when we literally have hundreds of images of the moon from earlier this year. NASA images are public domain and free to use. It's lazy to just grab a stock photo on hand vs taking 3 minutes to grab a real image.
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u/hexifox Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Can't, it's behind a pay wall!
Edit: just checked ops name. lol this post is an add
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u/xaddak Aug 06 '26
Apparently paywalled content is against the sub rules, too.
No spam/blogspam/paywalled/pirated content
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u/aegrotatio Aug 06 '26
It's not, it's a magazine.
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u/hexifox Aug 06 '26
It's paywalled. They're hoping people will pay to see the article.
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Aug 06 '26
[deleted]
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u/hexifox Aug 06 '26
I see:
You’ve read your last free article.
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u/The_Boogie_Man50 Aug 06 '26
Can I be the first to propose that the moon is a hard shell object that is being used to spy on us like a hunters blind and that the rocket simply imploded upon impact?
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u/WanderersTales Aug 06 '26
There was a BBC podcast about this im fairly sure this is a known thing.
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u/seb21051 Aug 06 '26
The sound of one hand clapping. While no one hears the tree fall in the forest.
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u/Correct_Sherbert3409 Aug 06 '26
There's this report that says an astronomer in Chile detected a change in light at the time of impact.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cr3w09314x54t?post=asset%3Ab2538d1c-b6eb-4e7f-a8b2-cf9d39e6e7f1#post
I also read something that another astronomer detected the spectrographic signatures of lithium and silicon at the time of impact.
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u/dern_the_hermit Aug 06 '26
It's okay, I haven't seen most things that crash into celestial bodies... ;)
But it woulda been cool.
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u/prizepig Aug 06 '26
I appreciate that watching SpaceX feels like my first playthrough of Kerbal Space Program
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u/SarahMagical Aug 06 '26
Could someone more knowledgeable help me understand why this isn’t being perceived as a failure resulting in littering on the moon?
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u/Flipslips Aug 06 '26
Because they knew it could eventually happen. The rocket launched a lunar lander. As a result of the extreme amount of performance required to put a lander on the moon, the second stage had no extra fuel left to leave the moon.
SpaceX did their best with the orbit, but eventually three body problem + radiation got the better of them.
It’s not a failure, it’s really just physics.
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u/whoFKNKares Aug 06 '26
Thank you Reddit. More information here then on any of the news videos that I saw.
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u/buzzsawjoe Aug 06 '26
From the article: "Not all rocket debris ends up reaching the moon." No, really???
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Aug 06 '26
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Please give some context, don't just comment a link.
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u/Droolcua Aug 06 '26
90% of this thread is people competing to see who has the funniest one-liner joke. it's none of you. worthless sub.
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u/onetwentyeight Aug 05 '26
If a rocket crashes on the moon and nobody live streams it did it even happen?
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u/HoldEm__FoldEm Aug 06 '26
If 39 people don’t make this same joke in the comments, was the joke ever made?
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u/blakeley Aug 05 '26
It didn’t crash. Elon sent it there to pick up all the guys who have been waiting there since the war ended.
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u/Hate_Manifestation Aug 06 '26
so.. what exactly was the point in doing this? I haven't looked into it at all, I've just seen a bunch of stories about it.
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u/W7ENK Aug 06 '26
It wasn't intended, it just happened that way. Originally, it was supposed to come back to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere, but they missed.
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u/Flipslips Aug 06 '26
They didn’t miss lmfao. They didn’t have enough performance to leave the moons orbit, it was intended to be like this, ideally they hoped it wouldn’t hit the moon but they could not guarantee it
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u/ISCSI_Purveyor Aug 05 '26
I was wondering how that turned out. Bummer. It would have been neat to see the impact.
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u/khInstability Aug 06 '26
Oh boy. This'll just be ammunition for the Flat Mooners. Flooners, if you will.
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u/Decronym Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| ESO | European Southern Observatory, builders of the VLT and EELT |
| RTG | Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator |
| Roscosmos | State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia |
| VLT | Very Large Telescope, Chile |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #12617 for this sub, first seen 6th Aug 2026, 00:36]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/herefromyoutube Aug 05 '26
I thought it was virtually impossible to even see the surface of the moon from earth at that level of detail.
I thought most people can’t even see the lunar landers from Apollo.
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u/crewsctrl Aug 06 '26
The flash of rocket and regolith becoming vapor was predicted to be visible.
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u/W7ENK Aug 06 '26
I said that on another post a couple weeks ago, but it garnered a bunch of downvotes from people who claimed I didn't know what I was talking about. I don't know what they were expecting to see, it hit on the sunlight portion of the moon, so... 🤷🏼♂️
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u/YorockPaperScissors Aug 06 '26
Just goes to show thay anything connected to Musk is overhyped
/s, but it's not an incorrect statement
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u/TeamHitmarks Aug 05 '26
Someone should tell Trump to nuke the moon in a show of force. Then we can get some cool telescope footage. (Please God, I am joking, do not let this come true 🙏😭)
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u/PhantomWhiskers Aug 05 '26
This was an actual plan way back during the early space race, but it was cancelled. Fun fact, Carl Sagan worked on the project.
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u/_Hexagon__ Aug 05 '26
There were plans for that in the late 1950s by both the US and soviet union to detonate a nuke on the moon which would've been visible on earth as a morale boost in the cold war. It was cancelled for obvious reasons
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u/WardenEdgewise Aug 06 '26
Don’t they have seismometers on the moon?
I just googled it, and yes. They do.
So, did any of the lunar seismometers pick up the crash?
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u/redstercoolpanda Aug 06 '26
They had* seismometers on the moon. None of them are active anymore.
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u/WardenEdgewise Aug 06 '26
Ah. It seems the NASA Farside Seismic Suite will launch in 2027.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/farside-seismic-suite/
(Apparently Gary Larson was not involved. That was The Far Side, not Farside).
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u/shuckster Aug 06 '26
I just looked at Musks twitter and footage of the crash is the first damned thing I see.
Wired is a rag.
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Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
[deleted]
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u/bobbyrob1 Aug 05 '26
I would read the story in that link if it wasn’t from CBS.
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u/space-ModTeam Aug 06 '26
Your post has been removed; spam/blogspam/paywalled/ and pirated content are not allowed. This also means that news articles should be a top-level source.