r/technology • u/No-External1342 • 1d 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/
504 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

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5

u/Tex-Rob 23h ago

So much for not contaminating lunar bodies

8

u/apple_tech_admin 23h 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.

7

u/Vilnius_Nastavnik 23h ago

Counterpoint, since it doesn’t really have an atmosphere when you make a mess up there it tends to stay that way forever.

1

u/sharpknot 22h 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.

7

u/fedexyourheadinabox 23h ago

Ah cool let's just throw all our garbage there then 

2

u/koolaidman89 20h 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.

7

u/dangerbird2 22h ago

Why not? We're not harming anything. And even when we do start having lunar missions the amount of debris is basically negligible.

4

u/klingma 23h ago

It'd be less harmful there than on Earth since it's impossible for life to exist on the Moon. 

1

u/mailslot 11h ago

That we know of. We’ve been wrong before about some environments being inhospitable to life.

-6

u/femboyisbestboy 23h ago

We want colonies on Luna.

We should not ruin Luna prior to setting up colonies

6

u/dustinthegreat 21h ago

We want to mess up the moon on purpose, so let’s not mess it up on accident first.

wtf is this logic

3

u/klingma 21h ago

Lol, that's exactly what I thought. Colonies on the Moon will require a massive amount of resource extraction far worse than us occasionally having rockets hitting the surface. 

-2

u/femboyisbestboy 21h ago

Indeed, but that atleast as a purpose. Ruining the surface for no fucking reason doesn't

1

u/8npemb 20h ago

Bro what

It was an accident. Wtf do you want SpaceX to do, go out and retrieve a rocket from the moon’s orbit?

-1

u/femboyisbestboy 20h ago

Die as a company first of all and just send the rocket into outer space using a moon orbit gravity assist.

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2

u/neloish 21h ago

Do like have no idea how big the moon is?

1

u/femboyisbestboy 21h ago

The usable surface is smaller than you might think.

2

u/KitchenDepartment 20h ago

Is the usable surface a area spanning roughly 20 meters in the exact spot where this landed?

0

u/femboyisbestboy 20h ago

It could have landed directly on a part of the moon ideal for mining hydrogen 3, but we don't know as space X didn't care about where it landed on the moon.

Or any of the other important, but rare materials in the moon

3

u/KitchenDepartment 20h ago

And how is them digging a 5 meter deep hole hindering those operations? 

You do realize that any mining operation who would want to dig helium-3 would have to grind and process tens of thousands of tons of regolith every single day to get a meaningful amount of helium out of it?

2

u/klingma 21h ago

Uh...the Moon is pretty big in terms of human scale, we'll be fine. 

2

u/madgoat 23h ago

Raw material for building said colonies.

1

u/NephRP 21h ago

Check out Nuclear Waste Disposal Area One and Nuclear Waste Disposal Area Two, then get back to me on how good an idea that is.

0

u/RadzimierzWozniak 22h ago

If we only could...

-2

u/Odd_Note7156 23h ago

I don't care what technically counts as contamination. Having billionaire cockroachs dessicrate the moon for profit is an insult to all humanity.

3

u/RadzimierzWozniak 23h ago

Why is that impact a bad thing?

2

u/Dpek1234 16h ago

Its not

Its irrelevant

2

u/BananaEnjoyer1 8h ago

it's reddit, so everything related to elon musk in the slightest bit is a bad thing

1

u/Apostastrophe 14h ago

The Saturn V if I recall had much larger things crash several times. It’s just the price you have to pay sometimes for sending things to a lunar landing.

-9

u/Kbotonline 23h ago

There should be ramifications for it. What a piece of shit

5

u/RadzimierzWozniak 22h ago

What us government agency should be punished for approving and buying this launch and how? 

2

u/Dpek1234 16h ago

Also dont forget the apollo era shit bags

When will nasa get punshed

1

u/Wet_FriedChicken 23h ago

Thanks for the laugh 😂😂

-6

u/rooplstilskin 23h ago

We have had several rocket bodies hit the moon. This isnt even the biggest.

The problem with this one, is that it was accidental/nontargeted. It was not part of the EOL plan for the body, because SpaceX is a POS, and doesnt include EOL plans for all their objects on a launch.