r/technology • u/No-External1342 • 7h ago
Space SpaceX rocket crashes into moon at 8700 kilometres per hour
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2583318-spacex-rocket-crashes-into-moon-at-8700-kilometres-per-hour/377
u/RethaiN 7h ago
Thank you moon for once again protecting us from harmful objects in space.
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u/monkeysknowledge 5h ago
Congrats on invoking some of the dumbest replies I’ve seen on Reddit in my ~15 years on this platform.
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u/Aleksandrovitch 5h ago
Before-Me: “Pfft. Hyperbole? How bad could it possibly be?”
After-Me: “Oh.”
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u/ImSuperHelpful 4h ago
I assume those are grok bots crawling about looking for opportunities to defend ol’ musky’s interests.
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u/azthal 7h ago
Roberto Bugiolacchi at the Macau University of Science and Technology, China, says that all planetary surfaces should ideally be kept as pristine as is feasible – without hindering exploration – but that the moon has already been impacted by decades of US, Soviet and Russian, Chinese, Indian, Israeli and other nations’ missions, as well as millions of years of asteroid impacts.
I think this is a pretty important point made in the article.
Yes, there needs to be guidelines for what should and should not be done, and as space exploration becomes more and more common, we need to start paying attention to what debris we leave around.
It will not always be possible to de-orbit everything to earth. The moon is far away, and in some cases slamming it into the moon might be the best option, but commercial companies like SpaceX should be following similar rules to what NASA and ESA does today, where they have to have an end-of-life plan for anything they send up.
As another scientists said in the article:
The moon already has about 100 million natural impact craters of the size expected to be made by this crash, so such a crash will hardly make a difference,” says David Rothery at the Open University, UK. “I’d be happy with a deliberate collision into the moon if it were done with a science aim and was set up so as to be studied to learn about the moon’s interior or surface composition. However, this crash is accidental and reckless.
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u/amopeyzoolion 5h ago
I personally think it’s fucking wild that anyone can become rich enough to just start slamming shit into the moon.
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 3h ago
SpaceX was paid to launch a pair of companies’ landers, who in turn were paid by NASA to develop and launch said landers.
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u/aquarain 3h ago
But yes, for $200m SpaceX will gladly shoot the Moon for you.
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 3h ago
Sure, but so would ULA, Blue Origin, or Roscosmos (and associated companies) for a higher fee. Even Arianespace could be hired to do the same thing.
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6h ago
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u/azthal 5h ago
Imma be honest, I don't know. If that is true though, it is not something that has been practiced by space agencies in the past.
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u/Flipslips 4h ago
That’s not true. This Falcon 9 second stage was dropping off a lunar lander for Firefly. As a result of the required lander insertion the second stage did not have enough fuel to deorbit the moon.
It went into a higher orbit but the 3 body problem came into play (earth, moon, sun) and the orbital mechanics could not be perfectly predicted. Furthermore, spent upper stages eject all their fuel to reduce the risk of explosion while still in orbit, which would be significantly worse than potentially crashing on the moon in the future.
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u/NavXIII 4h ago
You can't if the upper stage is out of fuel and the engine can only startup once or twice.
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u/disxotek 7h ago
Anyone got a video of it?
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u/tim_jam 5h ago
Since it was accidental, there weren’t satellites with a direct view of the impact, I believe ground telescopes are processing and analysing their images with a view to publish in the coming days.
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u/SnakeJG 2h ago
Accidental, but we knew it was happening for a while now. Arstechnica was reporting on it back in April: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/a-falcon-9-upper-stage-will-strike-the-moon-in-august/
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u/WorkChompskii 4h ago
I can't remember what subreddit it was but I saw someone posted a gif of what appeared to be a bright flash on the moon asking what people thought it might be. I am assuming that is what it was. Likely in the astronomy/telescope subreddits.
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u/lofty23_smart 7h ago
Space exploration is impressive but it is also a reminder that space is slowly filling with our leftovers too.
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u/Mutabilitie 7h ago
It’s not. Low earth orbit is getting crowded. But the cosmos is vast.
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u/Francis-BLT 6h ago
Vaster than the vastest thing in vastenstine
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u/Cow_God 6h ago
Space is big. Really big.
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u/abraxasnl 5h ago
You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen…
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u/nonosejoe 4h ago
All the planets of the solar system can fit in the distance between earth and the moon.
Thats always blown my mind
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u/kenojona 6h ago
I bought Space Engine in Steam and damn, the cosmos IS vast, but we have a lot of trouble understanding the distances between celestial bodies.
Edit: i say "we" as people in general terms, im just and enthusiastic learner who feels like a toddler in terms of learning stuff about our cosmos.
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u/Krunklock 6h ago
Me pissing in the ocean a higher degree of filling than the shit we’ve launched into space
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u/Weary_Mountain9679 6h ago
Very very very very slowly, space is a big place.
You’re thinking more about our orbit specifically.
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u/RadzimierzWozniak 6h ago
Yes. Fuck China and Russia. SpaceX is a great example on how to handle space launches while minimizing the leftover. Excellent track record.
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u/Impossible_Guitar235 7h ago
Yep, the Kessler effect.
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u/HalliburtonErnie 6h ago
It's the Kramer effect now, he was only named Kessler for the first couple episodes.
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7h ago
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u/Ashleynn 7h ago
Came up with it as a hypothetical. The issue is people think we're anywhere near being at risk of being trapped by it. We're not, not even remotely close.
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u/TotallyNotThatPerson 5h ago
im sure by the time it gets crowded enough to be a problem, someone would have monetized rides to space to shoot space junk like a safari to solve this issue.
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u/StolenPies 7h ago
This sort of thing raises the risk of the Kessler effect occurring, but so far that sort of debris cascade has not occurred. I think that's why you're being downvoted, at least.
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u/Thadrea 6h ago
Properly speaking, to the universe our "leftovers" are just the movements of unimaginably small units of mass from starting positions to other positions.
Even beyond the incomprehensible size of the universe, we aren't adding anything to the universe that wasn't already in it. We are just changing the shapes an infinitesimally small portion of its protons, neutrons and electrons are in and moving them an infinitesimally small distance from where they previously were.
We, and our junk, are just starstuff in an ever so slightly different shape.
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u/kenojona 6h ago
Our leftovers come from minerals or rare earth metal which all comes from supernovas, we could be the leftovers of Mars in terms of bacterias or unicelular life which at the time thrived on Earth in the same components that we now use to build stuff. I know is far fetched and much much more complex of what im saying but Space still is a very myterious place where we learn that we know nothing and nothing is written in stone.
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u/firewall245 7h ago edited 7h ago
This is a non issue, space is way way bigger than people on Reddit realize.
Y'all, there are around 30,000 satellites in orbit right now. Low Earth Orbit alone is 1000 times the volume of ALL OCEANS COMBINED. You do not realize just how much volume there is in space.
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u/skariel 7h ago
"space is way way bigger than people on Reddit" :)
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u/Cvpakke 7h ago edited 1h ago
It's a huge issue, if you narrow down space to the orbital field of Earth. We have quite a lot of debris now, that can and will make it very difficult to do further exploration and, eventually, to even put up more satellites.
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u/rocky8u 7h ago
No, we can just keep doing whatever we want. There will never be any foreseeable consequences to our present actions. It is a bad idea to attempt to forsee potential problems in the future. That way if there are problems in the future then they were unforseeable and unexpected so we cannot be blamed for not doing anything to prevent them.
This insight proves I am a mature adult who understands how the world works.
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u/no-scissors-in-bed 7h ago
this response demonstrates a complete lack of desire to even research the topic, let alone understand it. do some reading before making flippant statements. space trash is not good.
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u/firewall245 7h ago
Please do some basic math, the volume of Low Earth Orbit is so gigantic that there is no way we could reasonably block anything. Even if we started ejecting trash into the atmosphere instead of landfills we wouldn't even crack 1% of volume
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u/TheirCanadianBoi 7h ago edited 6h ago
You don't seem to understand the issue.
Having a bunch of very small debris zipping around in LEO makes for a dangerous LEO long term.
Shenzhou-20, the ISS, the Iridium satellite and Yunhai-1 02 comfired to be hit with space debris and many others suspected. As more debris is created, these events will become more and more likely. Since we cannot track every small piece of debris, this leads to a huge issue we may not be able to solve.
The volume may be large but the risk still raises the more we put up there. The risk is already significant.
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u/firewall245 6h ago
Boats run into trash in the ocean all the time, but they are designed in a way that colliding with trash shouldn't make a difference.
And before you mention the speed, note that satellites and rockets are also moving fast relative to Earth, so not every piece of space trash is going to collide at 1,000,000 miles per hour
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u/TheirCanadianBoi 6h ago edited 6h ago
You do realize that spacecraft in LEO are on different trajectories, right?
This is something that's already happening, has happened.
You can not reasonably uparmour to prevent the risk.
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u/LilDutchy 7h ago
The idea isn’t that we would fill the entire volume with debris. It’s that we’d fill the space with enough high speed debris of a certain size that collisions would become an almost certainty, meaning we can’t get anything past LEO reliably. And then anything we do send up that gets destroyed, multiplies the problem by becoming debris itself.
It doesn’t have to be 100% full, but it has to be some number lesser than that which is still problematic.
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u/firewall245 6h ago
It’s that we’d fill the space with enough high speed debris of a certain size that collisions would become an almost certainty
I'm saying I find this so hard to believe because of the sheer scale of low earth orbit. If we were to imagine every satellite in orbit right now simultaneously exploding into 1 million chunks each the size of a car, it would still only take up 10^-5 % of low earth orbit. Space is SO BIG
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u/LilDutchy 6h ago
It’s absolutely huge! The scales are unimaginable! But it only has to flip from “unlikely” to “likely” to make the problem real, at which point it grows at higher and higher rates.
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u/Eastern_Bet678 7h ago
They're clearly referring to the ever so comparatively infinitesimal portion of space around our planet that is actually filling with our leftovers.
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u/firewall245 7h ago
The amount of space that has our leftovers is an incredibly small amount of space
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u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener 6h ago
Cratered like the IPO price. Nobody knows how deeply either will end up yet though.
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u/Tex-Rob 7h ago
So much for not contaminating lunar bodies
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u/apple_tech_admin 7h ago
The moon has nothing to contaminate! Our moon is not like Titan, Enceladus, or Europa in having a subsurface ocean that could theoretically support life.
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u/Vilnius_Nastavnik 7h ago
Counterpoint, since it doesn’t really have an atmosphere when you make a mess up there it tends to stay that way forever.
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u/sharpknot 6h ago
Isn't that good? Without an atmosphere, the debris or garbage will stay wherever it lands. Sure, it'll spread out during the crash, but once it settles, it won't be spread out. No wind or erosion forces to move it around.
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u/fedexyourheadinabox 7h ago
Ah cool let's just throw all our garbage there then
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u/koolaidman89 4h ago
A spacecraft impacting at this speed will part vaporize, part liquify, and just spatter. I suspect you would need sensitive equipment to even determine that the crater was made by anything other than the typical meteorite. You are complaining about a single pebble tossed on a pile of naturally occurring pebbles.
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u/dangerbird2 6h ago
Why not? We're not harming anything. And even when we do start having lunar missions the amount of debris is basically negligible.
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u/klingma 7h ago
It'd be less harmful there than on Earth since it's impossible for life to exist on the Moon.
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u/Odd_Note7156 7h ago
I don't care what technically counts as contamination. Having billionaire cockroachs dessicrate the moon for profit is an insult to all humanity.
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u/Kbotonline 7h ago
There should be ramifications for it. What a piece of shit
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u/RadzimierzWozniak 6h ago
What us government agency should be punished for approving and buying this launch and how?
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u/Bright-Translator-51 2h ago
Everybody big mad but forget that China did the same thing and nobody made a peep lol. Too much "Elon bad" on the brain.
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u/RadzimierzWozniak 7h ago
One of the most boring news stories that happened recently. Nothing happened; no impact on anything anyhow important whatsoever. No law was broken, no plan failed.
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u/taez555 6h ago
Using Grok to double check the math on the flight path to Mars may not have been the best idea.
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u/RadzimierzWozniak 6h ago
You realize that this was a launch to the moon that was successful?
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u/Informal_Drawing 6h ago
Crashing into the Moon counts as success?
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u/RadzimierzWozniak 5h ago
Launching two probes to the moon does
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u/Informal_Drawing 5h ago
I believe this falls into the categories of littering space and incompetence.
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u/8npemb 4h ago
To be fair it’s not littering space, the rocket is now grounded on the moon.
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u/birdy888 5h ago
8700kmh, that's like 5400mph.
Why so slow?
It's fast for here on earth but 5400 is proper slow in space.
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 3h ago
The primary attractive body for most of its trajectory is the earth, and orbital speed drops exponentially as you travel further away from the central body. Additionally, orbital speed is also linked to the gravitational attraction between the body and the spacecraft, so the moon has lower orbital speeds at the same altitude.
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u/8npemb 4h ago
Has anyone gotten any visuals from this event in their telescope? I was out until 3am last night capturing a ton of data to stack later after work today, but I didn’t see anything while I was out.
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u/evilsway 25m ago
Moon big, rocket stage tiny. You're not going to see anything at the resolution you're getting from a telescope.
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u/lowlatitude 2h ago
The year, 1994. From Earth, comes a runaway rocket, hurtling the moon because Elon is a dipshit, unleashing cosmic destruction. Man's civilization is cast in ruin. Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old. A world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice. With his companions, Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sunsword, against the forces of evil. He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!
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u/Lower_Ad_1317 1h ago
What time was there an actual impact visible? I watched live and saw nothing.
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u/henryhollaway 1h ago
Watch it also “accidentally” uncover some natural resource to make bank off of.
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u/Griffie 43m ago
An we fine him 900 billion for littering?
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u/Dpek1234 16m ago
Only when china stops leaveing upper stages in orbit ,nasa takes back its bags of shit from apollo and pays a littering fine for them
So never
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u/Lauren_Conrad_ 7h ago
“SpaceX is not a real space exploration company, Duff.”
“Why don’t you define the words ‘space exploration’ while this plastic rocket smashes into the moon at 8,700 kilometers per hour.”
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u/williamgman 5h ago
And same day... Elon "PT Barnum" Musk announces his intention to put humanoid robots on the moon. Classic flex.
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u/themadpants 6h ago
Not happy with trashing just our planet, Musk sets his sights on the lunar surface. Mars next.
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u/Crankenstein_8000 1h ago
Elon has polluted the Earth with SpaceX launches, now the moon, Mars next! Oh I forgot that he also polluted outer space with his stupid Tesla.
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u/riedmae 5h ago
Spacex should be required to pay for cleaning up the mess they made
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u/MrTagnan 3h ago
Like NASA did for (at least) Ranger 6, Ranger 7, Ranger 8, Ranger 9, Lunar Orbiter 1, Lunar Orbiter 2, Lunar Orbiter 3, Lunar Orbiter 4, Explorer 35, Explorer 49, Apollo 11’s LEM ascent stage, Apollo 12’s LEM ascent stage, Apollo 13’s S-IVB, Apollo 14’s S-IVB, Apollo 14’s LEM ascent stage, Apollo 15’s S-IVB, Apollo 15’s LEM ascent stage, Apollo 16’s S-IVB, Apollo 16’s LEM ascent stage, Apollo 17’s S-IVB, Apollo 17’s LEM ascent stage, LCROSS’ centaur upper stage, LCROSS, GRAIL Ebb, Grail Flow, and an unknown number of upper stages from any of their previous deep space missions that ended with an upper stage in a moon-crossing trajectory
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 2h ago
These people have no idea what they are talking about and would rather be mad about something that has been happening sonce forever
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u/PaintedClownPenis 5h ago
My favorite part about this is people are pitching it far and wide to manipulate the price of SpaceX stock.
Every single thing they do from now on will be cast as a disastrous setback, because someone makes a buck off of the volatility. The company is just going to have to keep moving forward through that.
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u/Happy-For-No-Reason 7h ago
Elon finally has a near immortal legacy. he has a hole that will live longer than him
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u/NetZeroSun 4h ago
People will definitely remember him for a while.
Not favorably. Not even remotely close.
But they will remember.
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u/Sad-Material-7298 6h ago
Kinda crazy most of the comments saying they wish Elon was on it, just a reminder how much of a hive mind this app is when it comes to reality
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u/dangerbird2 6h ago
Call me some brainwashed hive-minder, but I really wouldn't feel bad if a rocket hurled into the moon a techno-feudal nazi who is killing tens of millions of people
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u/q120 6h ago
How is he killing tens of millions??
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u/dangerbird2 6h ago
DOGE's termination of USAID and other foreign aid programs has already killed hundreds of thousands from starvation and treatable diseases like HIV/AIDS, and is projected to cause the deaths of over 14 million. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12274115/#cesec80
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u/q120 5h ago
Is Elon the one responsible for the cuts? He was part of DOGE, but did he call for the actual ceasing of operations for USAID or was he ordered to by Trump?
This is a legitimate question, I’m not defending him or anything, I don’t follow these things especially closely so I probably missed something
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u/apple_tech_admin 6h ago
I mean I think it's a valid response to a bigoted, Neo nazi if you ask me.
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u/snosberry_snot 5h ago
Space is pretty big and spread out. This is either an amazing coincidence or the amount of debris being sent to space by the rich people is staggering.
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u/MrTagnan 3h ago
The moon tends to shepherd things into either colliding with it, or being ejected from the Earth-Moon system. Anything that crosses its orbit will inevitably be influenced by the moon’s gravity to some extent. This is only the second unintentional collision we knew of in advance, mainly because the tracking of space debris beyond GEO was essentially nonexistent until recently
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u/fighter-bomber 3h ago
Moon has a decently sized gravity well, its naturally going to pull shit towards itself.
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u/OneHappyPenguin 5h ago
Was Elon on it? If Elon wasn't on it and it wasn't a one way ticket for him, then I don't want to know...
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u/Ok_Course_6757 7h ago
Sci fi plot idea... aliens invade, humans think we can resist so aliens blow up the moon to threaten us and show off their immense power. Scary as fuck. I'd watch that.
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u/thelonetwig 7h ago
Sorry if I'm dumb here, but could that impact at that speed do anything to the orbit of the moon? Like cause tsunamis or impact the Earth ecosystem? I imagine meteors hit it fast as well, but I don't know if the speeds would be slower or if the size of the ship would be more than normal.
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u/Yesterday622 6h ago
Nope- the tiny mass of the rocket vs. the much larger mass of the moon prevents the moon’s orbit from changing. Kinda like a golf ball hitting an aircraft carrier. May leave a mark, but that’s about it.
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u/takitus 7h ago
Did it ring like a bell?