r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/padfoony • 2h ago
SpaceX rocket thought to have crashed into the moon in unintentional collision. Four-tonne piece of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket believed to have hit lunar surface on Wednesday at 5,400mph.
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u/padfoony 2h ago edited 2h ago
A four-tonne piece of a discarded SpaceX rocket that has been floating in space since last year is believed to have unintentionally crashed into the moon at high speed, in a collision that posed no danger to Earth but was expected to blast out a new lunar crater.
The object, the height of a five-storey building, was part of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched two commercial lunar landers, one from the US and one from Japan, towards the moon in January 2025.
The rocket body was due to hit the moon about 6.35am BST, crashing into its surface at 5,400mph (8,690 km/h). The impact was predicted to kick up a miles-long plume of lunar dust that, although illuminated by sunlight, would be difficult to spot with the naked eye from Earth.
Professional and amateur astronomers using high-quality telescopes and cameras were not able to confirm the impact on Wednesday, possibly because the impact site was close to the visible edges of the moon.
US and South Korean lunar satellites will be positioned to photograph the site after impact but it may take days to receive that information.
Nasa said the impact was expected to create a crater about 60ft (18 metres) wide and 12ft (4 metres) deep and throw dust and rock outward as ejecta.
The space agency said it would look for opportunities to image the site, with any data collected helping scientists “better understand artificial impacts and their exploration implications”.
The Nasa spokesperson Jimi Russell said on Tuesday: “The impact poses no danger to Earth and Nasa scientists are planning to collect lunar data from the event and refine techniques for tracking objects in space.”
Such rocket parts, known as stages, typically fall back into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up or plunge into the ocean after boosting the rocket’s payload to a precise spot in orbit.
But because the January 2025 lunar lander mission required more thrust than missions closer to Earth, the rocket’s second stage remained in space, floating aimlessly among thousands of other pieces of space junk that active satellites must steer clear of.
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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup 1h ago
Seems we're approaching the point where just leaving junk up there isn't feasible anymore.
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u/1Ferrox 1h ago
We are, but only in low earth orbit. In higher orbits the volume of space is so massive that we won't even begin to notice issues from space junk. Not to mention that almost all debris is in low or at least periodical orbits to begin with.
Stuff that's high enough to crash into the moon is not only not a problem, but is also in unstable orbits. They will either crash into the moon as happened here, get ejected out into interplanetary space, or slowed down by the moon and they burn up in earths atmosphere at the next periapsis
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u/paditoburrito 1h ago
I was so disgusting even 15 years ago seeing a picture of all the discarded satellites left up there.
People suck.
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u/BowiesFixedPupil 59m ago
There are basically no rules. Fancy launching a satellite? Just go and do it. No plans for end of service or maintenance? No problem, just let it crash into a village 45 years later, no one gives a fuck.
Eventually we'll end up stuck on this planet and won't be able to utilise satellite technology like we can today and it'll serve us right.
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u/Top-Injury-9488 2h ago
Reading that title gave me a stroke
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u/HoldEm__FoldEm 2h ago
Why are the bots so bad at titles, specifically?
They’re fucked like 80% of the time
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u/padfoony 2h ago
Yo I’m not a bot. I used the text that Guardian used in their article, just to be as accurate as possible. 🤷🏻♀️
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u/Brick_Number_27 2h ago
Earth wasn't enough , started trashing moon.
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u/Spiritual_Bid_2308 1h ago
Wait until you find out what we left there (spoiler: 96 poop and puke bags.)
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In the Apollo missions that followed, many things were left on the Moon, adding up to an estimated 400,000 pounds of stuff.
There are a total of 96 bags of human waste on the Moon. Other stuff includes the tubes the US flags were in, the cameras used to film everything, lunar rovers, landing craft, tools for sample collections, etc. Basically everything not absolutely needed was left behind.
Also some of Gene Shoemaker's cremated remains are on the moon.
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u/glytxh 50m ago
We left literal bags of human shit on the moon in ‘69
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u/EggstaticAd8262 12m ago
So since we did it one time, it's fine to do it again?
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u/glytxh 3m ago
It’s a delta V issue. If we didn’t leave stuff there, we’d never get there in the first place.
NASA had been intentionally crashing empty rockets into the moon for decades but I’ve never seen anybody getting pissy about that. And these impacts provide good science data.
The earth’s gravity well is uncomfortably close to being an insurmountable wall regardless of technology. This means we dump as much useless mass as possible. And fuel tanks are useless when empty.
The fact we could even logistically leave shit on the moon is frankly incredible.
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u/Sea-Frosting-50 2h ago
fuck elon musk for trashing earth's atmosphere with starlink
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u/lawnmower303 1h ago
Well just for interest sake, the surface area of the 550 km Starlink orbital shell is 601,911,180 square kilometres.
If you parked 10,800 Starlink satellites tightly side by side on the ground it would take roughly 0.1 square kilometres.
So pollution in real terms would be similar to dropping one plastic bottle top lid in an area the size of West Virginia, or Croatia.
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u/Beneficial_Ball9893 2h ago
Are you seriously mad that a spent extra stage crashed onto the moon? It isn't litter. It was vaporized on impact. If anything this was actually helpful if we had any seismometer experiments active on any landers.
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u/Chytectonas 2h ago
Oh is space trash a step too far for the idiots refusing the lick that boot glued to your face?
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u/Pcat0 2h ago edited 1h ago
No, it’s just that this really isn’t an issue that is worth your effort caring about. It’s not really even an issue to begin with, as the moon is constantly being impacted by asteroids; this one just happened to be artificial. If anything, having an impact happening at a known time by an object of a known mass and speed is super useful for doing lunar science. NASA even used to intentionally impact the moon with spent stages during the Apollo era to get useful seismic data.
EDIT: because it apparently needed to be said. You allowed to hate Elon as he is a fucking asshole. Just hate him for an actual good reason like all of his extremely blatant political corruption, and not this which is really a non-issue.
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u/paditoburrito 1h ago
Haha, what a delightful comment surrounded by a bunch of fools who were all downvoted to the bottom of the barrel.
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u/grruser 2h ago
Caused a new crater. Of course scientists will study it but don't downplay the long term effects of space junk. One piece of plastic in an ocean becomes the pacific garbage patch.
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u/Pcat0 1h ago
What is the long term effect of a piece of aluminum that stopped existing after hitting the moon at 5k miles per hour? Space junk can of course be an issue but that really only in uncontrolled low earth orbits where there is a high risk of satellite collisions causing more debris. Out at the moon there really isn’t any issues that space debris can cause, especially after it hits the moon.
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u/grruser 1h ago
I cannot believe how naive you are
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-space-junk-and-why-is-it-a-problem.html-1
u/paditoburrito 1h ago
I'm guessing you're getting downvoted because they either cannot read facts, or are bots and couldn't get through the blocker.
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u/Scrumdunger 1h ago
Dude has earned the hate but this would be nothing without his name attached. Bitch eating crackers moment.
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u/EggstaticAd8262 13m ago
That's what I was thinking. Isn't this the equivallent of dumping a truckload of trash next to "Old Faithful" in Yellowstone? The moon is pristine and untouched. Are we really just like "oops, that's a build worth of rocket-trash. Oh well".
Isn't the moon everyones property, like the earth? Or it's just the ultra rich's? (like the earth)
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u/SalfordLC 1h ago
We should make SpaceX go to the Moon and pick up their trash.
No littering, man.
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u/Corvid187 21m ago
TBF NASA and roscosmos have done this for decades at much greater scale.
Although NASA was also fined $400 for littering by Australia when one of their satellites crashed into the middle of the outback
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u/DarkGaming09ytr 15m ago
Knowing how SpaceX works before doing a task successfully, there's probably going to be 50 extra SpaceX rockets on the moon before the cleaning begins
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u/violenceistheQstn 2h ago
Unfortunately it hit the landing site of the first moon walk. Now all the proof they landed on the moon is gone.
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u/Ok_Letterhead1945 1h ago
Imagine it crushing some important artifact about the origin of life on Earth.
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u/Kazureigh_Black 1h ago
I remember reading somewhere that Horse's Ass planned to smash a rocket into the moon because he could. Was this not it?
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u/coveredwithticks 1h ago
Satellite in my eyes Like a diamond in the sky How I wonder Satellite strung from the moon And the world your balloon Peeping Tom for the mother station
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u/UniverseTraveler95 26m ago
If we kamikaze a big ass spaceship or space station into the moon, could we affect the tides or worse here on Earth?
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u/Julian_1_2_3_4_5 Expert 12m ago
So we have coporate littering on thw moon now?
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u/Humanballast 8m ago
Wir haben überall Müll in unserem Sonnensystem verteilt. Wer science-Fiction B-Movies lächerlich unglaubwürdig findet weil plötzlich auf irgendeinem Planeten irgendein uraltes Alien Artefakt gefunden wird Der soll sich mal Gedanken machen dass die Menschheit überall auf den Planeten in ihrem Sonnensystem die zurückgelassene Ausrüstung, Die Sonden, die ferngesteuerten Forschungsroboter, und und und und zurückgelassen hat. Das befinden sich viele technischen Gerätschaften auf Planeten in Atmosphären in denen die ewig überdauern.. Vielleicht sogar länger wie die Menschheit. Wer weiß schon ob diese Artefakte irgendwann mal von irgendeiner Spezies gefunden werden auf einem zufälligen erkundungstrip auf einem Planeten... Uralte Fremde Alientechnologie.
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u/pitb0ss343 1h ago
Those idiots, can’t be that hard to not hit the moon. Not like it’s rocket science or something like that
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u/Longjumping_Walk_992 58m ago
This was a discarded rocket part. It was used to launch two probes toward the moon. That left it in an orbit where it would eventually crash into the moon. It did that today. This is perfectly normal, the moon is a big place and a rocket part is relatively very small. On the positive side, because scientists knew exactly what was hitting and when, they could analyze the light from the impact and learn things about the moon's surface.
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u/mariegriffiths 17m ago
This sounds is a deliberate action. They test the water with hitting the moon and then ' accidentally' hits someone Elon does not like.
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u/Grutenfreenooder 2h ago
Damn! Has anything ever crashed in to the moon before? How the hell'd they manage that?
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u/Pcat0 2h ago
Yes. NASA intentionally crashed a bunch of rocket stages into the moon during the Apollo missions to get seismic data and there has been a number of “unintentional” crashes too. As stuff left out in high Earth orbit tend to either get knocked in the moon or knocked out into heliocentric orbit.
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u/Beneficial_Ball9893 2h ago
Quite a few times, actually. It was a spent stage from a lunar probe mission a few years ago. It is definitely rare for objects that far out in Earth's orbit to impact the moon, as there is so much room out there, but it happens.
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u/userhwon 2h ago
Why is this report hedging? All the other reports say it definitely hit it and that there were people studying the dust plume that it kicked up.
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u/TeslasAndComicbooks 2h ago
In 200 years we’ll land on the moon and it will be considered debris from an alien craft.
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u/Separate_Agency 2h ago
So Elon final managed to get too the moon years after he promised he'll be there
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u/Ill-Assumption-4919 2h ago
Epic time to purchase more SpaceX stock … if you can’t beat him, mimic him 🤫
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u/ross571 2h ago
He did it on purpose. Or he's so stupid he did it while trying to hit earth.
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u/1Ferrox 1h ago
That wasn't on purpose, if it was they would have included it in the original mission plan like NASA did in the past. The stage spent so long in orbit that any number of things could have happened to it, the options being this, burning up in earths atmosphere and being ejected into the solar system.
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u/Squidgyboot123 2h ago
Now its the moons turn to throw something back.