On 5 August, a piece of a derelict SpaceX rocket traveling at 5,400 miles an hour met with the moon and punched a fresh hole into it near Einstein Crater. Astronomers were thrilled. The European Southern Observatory caught sodium and lithium flaring in the debris plume and called it a bonus.
The media called it a light show. Nobody was physically hurt, so nobody is responsible, and within a week the story was gone. I have spent 20 years tracking the junk humanity leaves behind in space for a living, and I want to tell you plainly what that crater actually is: a receipt.
It’s what you get when an entire industry treats the sky, and now the moon, as a place to dump what it no longer wants, and calls the dumping “normal operations” or “space exploration”. Here’s my thesis, and I won’t soften it: we don’t own the moon, but we’re behaving as though we did, and that behavior has a name. It’s the oldest colonial instinct there is, dressed up in aerospace engineering.
Take what you want, leave what you don’t, and let someone else, or something else, absorb the cost. Stewardship asks what we owe a place. Ownership asks what we can extract from it before anyone stops us.
Right now, in cislunar space, ownership is winning by default, because nobody with power has bothered to claim the alternative, and power doesn’t reside in controlling outcomes but rather in the ability to make choices. So, let’s start with the plain facts of the object itself. The Falcon 9 upper stage that hit the moon launched in 2025 carrying lunar landers, finished its job, and was simply abandoned in a high orbit that happened to cross the moon’s path.
Nobody designed a deliberate end for it. The curvature of spacetime and the sun’s radiation pressure did the steering instead, for months, until a predictable, computable trajectory ended predictably, in a fresh scar. SpaceX didn’t choose to hit the moon.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
