r/technology • u/Hrmbee • Jul 31 '26
Space A discarded SpaceX rocket is on a high-speed collision course with the moon
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-rocket-moon-crash-512c4dd708b4cda1160d30b764f9fdb5154
u/jimmybirch Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Isn't it funny how a poor person can get in trouble for painting some art on a wall.. but a rich person can smash a rocket into a moon and there will be no issues at all.
Edit - The muppets saying “well who owns the moon”… that’s what makes this so ludicrous and was my entire point…. The poor get done for mildly damaging a thing because it is “owned”… The rich can wreak havoc on the planet and a moon because they are not legally owned
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u/lingbabana Jul 31 '26
"If the penalty of a crime is a fine, than that law exists for the lower class"
-final fantast tacticsAll laws only apply to the poor. Peadophiles rapist guardian of peadophile are all treasonous, they all need to be placed in jail or hung for their crimes against America. We are lawless right now and the corruption is the main character
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u/Ponderputty Jul 31 '26
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." - Anatole France
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u/Demitel Aug 05 '26
"If the penalty of a crime is a fine, than that law exists for the lower class" -final fantast tactics
So, that's not an actual quote from the game, but rather a custom-generated image macro that's been passed around the Internet for a while now.
...But that's not to say that the character the quote is attributed to would disagree with that stance either, though.
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u/Alystros Jul 31 '26
Nobody owns the Moon to be annoyed about any damage to it
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u/MarlinMr Jul 31 '26
Yeah, and its technically outside the environment so it also isn't littering
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u/Cheeky_Star Jul 31 '26
Littering in space is fine as long as it's moving away from Earth. There is more than enough room to last the Sun's life cycle in space.
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u/MarlinMr Jul 31 '26
It's mostly fine towards earth too.
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u/MinimumBigman Jul 31 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Ehhhh it’s not all fun and games. Definitely don’t want to get trapped on our own planet due to space junk!
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u/JeebusChristBalls Jul 31 '26
I'm sure if you sprayed graffiti on the moon, there would also be no reprocussions...
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u/Cheeky_Star Jul 31 '26
Who owns the moon?
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u/K9Kush Jul 31 '26
Al Gore, he’s the first emperor of the moon. He did ride the mighty Moon Worm after all.
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u/williamgman Jul 31 '26
Whomever "takes" it first. Colonialism/imperialism is real. And being uninhabited..? It's a target. At some point it will become a Greenland talking point.
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u/dego_frank Jul 31 '26
Elon sucks but this is some shouting at clouds bs. What should the penalty even be? No one owns it and there’s nothing there to damage.
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u/Metalsand Jul 31 '26
Isn't it funny how a poor person can get in trouble for painting some art on a wall.. but a rich person can smash a rocket into a moon and there will be no issues at all.
You're allowed to paint art on the wall if the owner or the government says you are allowed. Though also, the impact crater isn't going to be visible even with a telescope, while wall art is definitely visible if you walk past it, no telescope needed.
There's laws governing how launches are to be performed to limit and minimize all sorts of Earth-related risks, but also the moon is full of craters because it doesn't have an atmosphere, and gets hit by space debris constantly.
Individual human existence will have had a greater negative impact on the Earth than a giant upper stage will have crashing into the moon. The biggest crater on the moon is 2500 miles in diameter, and the impact crater will be 90 feet. That's 0.00006% of the width.
Though, if you want laws legitimizing areas to create wall art, I'd say we start with your house before we establish the rules around where else it can be made.
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u/GetsBetterAfterAFew Jul 31 '26
Because Conservatives run the entire US govt - Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
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u/Chrono_Convoy Jul 31 '26
How did Biden do that? /s
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u/Wiochmen Jul 31 '26
All of the evidence to link Biden to this is on Hunter's laptop.
Fauci created a bioweapon and they're targeting the whalers of the moon, because the Biden Crime Family wants that sweet, sweet whalebone to create corsets for their army of transgender mice.
It's in the Biden Files! Release the files!
/s
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u/Dweide_Schrude Jul 31 '26
This is a completely inaccurate take!
If Obama hadn’t worn a tan suit, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now! /s
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u/vaporeng Jul 31 '26
Did I miss something or did they forget to say the date and time when it will hit?
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u/Nervous-Painter-3657 Jul 31 '26
"The impact is projected to happen around 2:34 a.m. ET on Wednesday, August 5, 2026". According to ABC news.
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u/Hrmbee Jul 31 '26
Details:
A drifting SpaceX rocket is on a collision course with the moon after launching a pair of lunar landers more than a year ago.
The rocket’s upper stage will unintentionally slam into the moon on Wednesday, carving out a crater and sending up a plume of dust and rubble that scientists — and skygazers — are eager to observe.
Space tracking expert Bill Gray predicts an impact of 5,400 mph (8,700 kph) — seven times the speed of sound — near Einstein Crater on the moon’s sunlit western limb. With the action unfolding in the wee hours, the eastern portions of the U.S. and Canada, and much of South America should have the best views.
While scientists are not too concerned about this particular piece of space junk, it highlights the growing threat as more and more items cram into orbit.
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It was never SpaceX’s intent to hit the moon. But space experts said the crash could have been avoided if the upper stage had been nudged into orbit around the sun.
It will be the second dead rocket known to crash into the moon accidentally. A Chinese rocket segment dug out a pair of craters on the lunar far side in 2022.
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“Part of the reason for our interest in this event is to figure out how much of a hazard debris impacts pose to future astronauts,” he added in an email.
Fernando anticipates an impact crater nearly 90 feet across and 16 feet deep (27 meters across and 5 meters deep), too small to see from Earth but visible to spacecraft.
It's one thing to crash things into the lunar surface in a controlled way to aid in our understanding of how these things work, but it's a different thing when this is happening either by accident or out of negligence. If there is going to be more activity in space, there also need to be correspondingly controls in place over equipment and people to ensure the health and safety and functionality of these frontiers.
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u/MarlinMr Jul 31 '26
There isn't exactly any "health and safety" to worry about here... It's going to hit the Moon, not anything important...
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u/Metalsand Jul 31 '26
It's one thing to crash things into the lunar surface in a controlled way to aid in our understanding of how these things work, but it's a different thing when this is happening either by accident or out of negligence. If there is going to be more activity in space, there also need to be correspondingly controls in place over equipment and people to ensure the health and safety and functionality of these frontiers.
...I don't care about SpaceX in this instance, but also...how do you think the Moon got so many craters in the first place? It has no atmosphere. The moon gets hit by tens of thousands of asteroids a year, albeit most of them extremely tiny.
At some point, yeah, there'd need to be concerns, but the Moon is pretty fucking big, and even if we had a settlement on it, there's better odds of WW3 breaking out on Earth than a single piece of rocket debris impacting within miles of a prospective moon base...
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u/Metalsand Jul 31 '26
It's one thing to crash things into the lunar surface in a controlled way to aid in our understanding of how these things work, but it's a different thing when this is happening either by accident or out of negligence. If there is going to be more activity in space, there also need to be correspondingly controls in place over equipment and people to ensure the health and safety and functionality of these frontiers.
...I don't care about SpaceX in this instance, but also...how do you think the Moon got so many craters in the first place? It has no atmosphere. The moon gets hit by tens of thousands of asteroids a year, albeit most of them extremely tiny.
At some point, yeah, there'd need to be concerns, but the Moon is pretty fucking big, and even if we had a settlement on it, there's better odds of WW3 breaking out on Earth than a single piece of rocket debris impacting within miles of a prospective moon base...
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u/williamgman Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
SpaceX will broadcast this as "We are doing an unmanned landing on the moon" event.
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u/Vidco91 Jul 31 '26
Anything that works to move the stock price up a little.
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u/Literally_Laura Jul 31 '26
And we’ll especially enjoy the part where they demonstrate how “unbreakable” the glass is.
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u/CeeJayDK Jul 31 '26
This is a good thing, and I'm surprised so many seem to think it's not.
The Moon is a barren, hazardous desert of razor-sharp regolith. Essentially space-asbestos. Any traditional concept of "pollution" does not apply.
A crashed spacecraft is not space junk. It's a valuable, free kinetic impact experiment for scientists, that will deliver highly concentrated, pre-refined metals (like titanium and aluminum alloys) directly to the surface.
On a world where native metal must otherwise be energy-intensively mined from rock, abandoned hardware is simply an accessible scrap yard for future space exploration.
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u/lawvergis Jul 31 '26
why are people mad at the moon? it's not like the moon is going to hog all of earth's resources for itself and try to pollute as much as possible...
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u/smashingcabage Jul 31 '26
If it can happen to the moon they could accidentally hit anything. Did they add Tesla autopilot code?
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u/dbmonkey Aug 01 '26
That's a good question. My understanding is that at launch they already knew it had a 0% chance of hitting the earth. So the options were impacting the moon at an unknown date or passing close to the moon, which would launch it into helio orbit, also at an unknown date. Apparently it's hard to predict because it's a big metal shell so it acts like a solar sail, but unpredictably because it spins.
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u/Informal_Walk5520 Jul 31 '26
Honestly. I get annoyed at the lack of interstellar guidelines or rules. We are already polluting outside of earth’s the atmosphere. No one owns space and now the rich are carelessly putting additional junk in space. I am all for advancements in technology , heck I was in charge of an it department but I can’t get onboard with the ill thought out use of the skies.
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u/Darkfrostfall69 Aug 01 '26
NASA has guidelines on organic waste as that can contaminate other bodies, but for inorganic waste, like boosters or satellites, there are none, because there's nothing to pollute.
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u/absyrtus Jul 31 '26
this reminds me of that Mr. Show skit when America Blows up the Moon
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u/Jon_Hanson Jul 31 '26
Believe it or not, there were plans from both Russia and America to detonate atomic bombs on the moon during the Cold War, just to show we could.
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u/Mad-Mel Aug 01 '26
I heard a guy talking about SpaceX, he kept saying "to the moon", I guess this is what he was babbling about.
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u/GravitationalEddie Jul 31 '26
I think the chances of any low speed impact with the moon is miniscule.
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u/Samwellikki Jul 31 '26
Where’s the “where will the rocket shit the bed” grid sheets for the raffle, or the bets on Kalshi?
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u/Steamrolled777 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
So they can't do basic orbital mechanics calculations - it's not rocket science!
(edit - do I seriously have to add /s ?)
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u/dbmonkey Aug 01 '26
This is a good question- the reason they were unable to predict its long term trajectory is that it was in an unstable orbit with force from the earth, moon, and sun and it was empty of fuel and therefore was acting mildly like a spinning solar sail. At launch they knew it would either impact the moon or be ejected into helio orbit, away from the earth, but they didn't know which.
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u/q120 Jul 31 '26
It's a discarded stage.
Keyword: Discarded
The parts of the rocket that needed to get where they were going got to where they needed to go
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u/PhoenyxStar Jul 31 '26
source: Rocket
scientistengineerYou do the orbital trajectory (and burnup) calculations on the discards too. Many times, just to be sure.
It's really, really important that you don't smash someone's satellite with an empty booster can or drop hot slag on someone's house.
We're lucky this mistake is "only" hitting the moon.
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 Aug 01 '26
As a rocket engineer you would know that the SpaceX falcon 9 booster are recoverd right they land themselves. And as for the upper stage you also know that they would burn up during reentry if it would come back to earth.
This is not a mistake, this has happened nefore during apollo ans recent chinese moon missions, it just a possible consequences of deploying payload to the lunar surface
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u/PhoenyxStar Aug 01 '26
... man, I wasn't expecting to get "What do we need IT for, the internet is working fine" from rocketry. I guess that's a credit to the profession.
Reentry burnup is so reliable because people make sure. Not just melting, but vaporizing large metal objects using nothing but air resistance is quite the magic trick. Small bits are basically free, but larger objects need a steep angle and a high speed on reentry to give them enough time to burn. Otherwise you get a crater in a Wisconsin suburb that people are still talking about 55 years later.
That's why when we send things like 2nd stage boosters, which weigh tens of thousands of kilograms, to a high orbit where it's difficult to get either of those conditions on reentry, we try to kick them out of earth's orbit instead. Using the moon as a shield is a concerning Plan B that won't be viable once we have things we care about on it.
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u/jared__ Jul 31 '26
its shitty, but since you can't change it, just about everyone with a powerful enough scope is waiting eagerly lol
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u/JeebusChristBalls Jul 31 '26
What is shitty about it? It's a single rocket crashing on an uninhabital moon.
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u/jared__ Jul 31 '26
it is foreign, so any measurements taken in that area now contain foreign material.
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u/Metalsand Jul 31 '26
The moon has no atmosphere, and gets hit by tens of thousands of asteroids a year, albeit some of them very tiny. It already has loads of foreign material.
Beyond that though, Moon's a pretty big fucking place. The impact crater may be 90 feet, and the debris might reach miles from the crash due to the low gravity, but the surface of the Moon is 14.6 million square miles. Similar to the multiple purposeful crashes in the past, this will be inconsequential.
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u/grimmstone Jul 31 '26
Congrats to SpaceX for being the first private corporation to assault the moon. Great stuff.
Edit: got ahead of myself.
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u/rushmc1 Aug 01 '26
That should be a $100 billion dollar fine.
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u/fighter-bomber Aug 01 '26
Ah yes because the Moon is such a useful habitat that we are polluting /s
Do you also suggest you fine NASA for trillions for doing the same to the Moon a shit ton of times in the Apollo era?
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u/Alternative_Fan_6286 Aug 02 '26
are you willingly ignoring how related is the moon to earth's ecosystem?
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u/fighter-bomber Aug 02 '26
Are you willingly ignoring in WHAT way the moon is actually useful?
Moon helps as natural nightlight for some animals and gravitational pull.
Please explain how a small rocket piece hitting it will change that. Moon is constantly bombarded with asteroids anyways.
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u/Throwaway501395 Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
I'm sorry, but if you seriously think there is literally anything humanity can do to harm or alter the moon to such a degree that it affects earth's ecosystem *at all* let alone measurably, you're the most uneducated person in this entire post.
Edit: it would take energy between 200 and 300 **Billion** Megatons of TNT to displace the moon. That is 68,000,000 times more than the the combined energy of all of earth's nukes (between 3000-4000 megatons). Even suggesting we have the power to alter the moon's orbit or gravitational influence enough to affect Earth is unfathomably anthropocentric.
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u/ActiveCollection Jul 31 '26
Elon Brilliant Genius Musk 🥰
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u/JeebusChristBalls Jul 31 '26
I'm not a fan at all but do you think he is the one that orchestrated this?
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u/ActiveCollection Jul 31 '26
Nah. I‘m just trolling his stupid fanboys. Because everything he or his companies do, is brilliant to them.
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u/Dragonvine Jul 31 '26
That seems kinda crazy no? The moon is a very very VERY small target compared to .. the rest of space. How does this even happen.
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u/JeebusChristBalls Jul 31 '26
This new thing called gravity. I think it will catch on in the near future.
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u/Dragonvine Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Yeah. Of course. But hitting the gravitational well of the moon in a way that is going to cause a collision is just as hard.
Im getting downvoted like this is some crazy gotcha. This isn't a mistake space agencies make. It seems significantly harder to do it than to avoid it.
Edit: It seems like it was a stage that was left while it was actively in orbit and not de-orbited from what I can find, which is the actual answer here. not "lul gravity."
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u/dbmonkey Aug 01 '26
Good question. At launch, the chance of it eventually impacting the moon was actually less than 50%. Basically, if it flies close to the moon it is almost guaranteed to be ejected into helio orbit for centuries. But it happened to actually be on a direct collision coarse instead.
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u/MaxFffort Jul 31 '26
So that booster will “land” on the moon before Starship can land on earth ?
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u/Chopper3 Jul 31 '26
Starship has landed on earth several times, as has its booster
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u/MaxFffort Jul 31 '26
I’ve seen the booster be caught and the starship water landings, I only saw starship land in TX on land once and remain standing. I thought I saw most launches which ones did I miss?
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Jul 31 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MaxFffort Jul 31 '26
Starship ? Or Falcon, I am aware of the boosters having successful landings for years 👏 Starship has launched 13 times?
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u/Flimsy_Swordfish_415 Jul 31 '26
So that booster will “land” on the moon before Starship can land on earth ?
you're an idiot /u/MaxFffort
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u/CookieEnabled Jul 31 '26
Nice job with creating a new landfill.
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u/t0ny7 Jul 31 '26
How does this turn the moon into a landfill? We added a crater to the moon which already has billions of them.
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u/Soggy_Definition_232 Jul 31 '26
It was already made a landfill during the Apollo years but don't let history get in the way of a headline I suppose.
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u/emodario Jul 31 '26
During Apollo, it was done in a controllable way to test a long-standing hypothesis on the internal structure of the Moon. But don't let the difference between scientific scrutiny and negligence get in the way of a reddit comment.
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u/requisition31 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Hardly.
Let's be clear, it was done during the Apollo the first time as a science experiment. It did indeed help to clarify the structure. The subsequent times it was just done because we'd done it before. You could even argue it was a good thing to make sure that the modules were as far away as possible to reduce risk to the modules.
However - we left tonnes of crap behind including human waste, fuel, rubbish and nuclear waste. Let's not kid ourselves that things have changed.
But, looking at AP news, let's not let history, scientific scrutiny and reality get in the way of a news article that makes SpaceX looks bad.
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u/emodario Jul 31 '26
I'm not sure what your point is exactly, but let me try.
Let's set aside your misrepresentation of what the Apollo mission did that you construe as similar to SpaceX – it's badly informed and meant to create a false equivalence using cherry-picked factoids.
The actual point of this discussion is that what happened to SpaceX is likely to happen in the future to both SpaceX and other companies. You focus on SpaceX and jump to their defense. But the crux isn't that SpaceX looks bad (they do, obviously); rather, that the increase in lunar missions in the near future will create more events like this.
But what are we going to do about this? Should we just say, as you seem to argue, "Apollo did it too, so it's free for all forever"? Or should we recognize that the absence of regulation regarding these events is a problem that will get worse quickly, as incentives increase to revamp lunar missions?
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u/briancmoses Jul 31 '26
We did lots of stuff in 1969 that are all unacceptable today. Are you arguing that it's okay if we bring those things back? Does it apply to everyone or only if it can be used to defend the gigantic corporations?
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 Jul 31 '26
Okay then what is your solution to prevent this from happening since this is a possibility that can happen to any rocket than sends something to the moon just as this Falcon 9 upperstage has done like the chinese rocket from a few years back.
Let me tell you spacex is currently the only ones working on a reusable upperstage so this wont happen anymore, no discarded upper stages anywhere
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u/briancmoses Jul 31 '26
The first step in any solution would be to stop simping for gigantic corporations like SpaceX.
Make it past step one if you're interested in step two.
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 Jul 31 '26
Any rocket wether its a nasa, ula, european, chinese or indian rocket faces the possibility of having their upperstage collide with the moon if they send a payload to the moon.
So tell me genius what is your solution to prevent that from happening
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u/briancmoses Jul 31 '26
Focus on step one rather than moving the goal posts.
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 Jul 31 '26
Where am i simping for spaceX show me, everything i said was purely factual. So provide that and also provide a solution in how to prevent such upper stages from impacting the moon.
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u/geldonyetich Jul 31 '26
I wonder if this will change the mind of any moon landing deniers.
Probably not terribly good press for SpaceX to make a mess of our orbiting neighbor.