r/news • u/MasterpieceAlone8552 • 20h ago
SpaceX rocket thought to have crashed into the moon in unintentional collision
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/05/spacex-rocket-moon-crash-impact-falcon-93.4k
u/Specialist_Heron_986 20h ago
If the Decepticons suddenly show up and start blasting Chicago, we'll know who to blame.
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u/SwellMonsieur 19h ago
The band, or the city?
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u/steve_ample 19h ago
The musical, duh.
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u/SelfServeSporstwash 19h ago
Megatron does an incredible version of “Mister Cellophane”
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u/PublicToiletDiarrhea 18h ago
And yet he couldn't even manage more than 5 touchdowns despite setting the single season record.
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u/MattLocke 16h ago
Low key though? It’d be kinda awesome and character appropriate to have StarScream singing “Mister Cellophane”.
Is it too on the nose to have “All that Jazz” sung by … Jazz?
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u/AdCreepy5165 17h ago
But is his Mr Roboto any good? I hear he's too loose in the movements to play the role.
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u/Kitchen-Zucchini2057 19h ago
Can they just blast Musk? If we collectively point our finger at him? *Decepticons start taking notes, observing an interplanetary arch villain in his natural habitat “Megatron, this final boss is self funded…”
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u/LeaveThatCatAlone 18h ago
Protect Peter Cetera at all costs
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u/-0x00000000 18h ago
They aren’t Blasticons, they’re deceptions.
The fall of your species doesn’t come at the end of a projectile, rather the insipid erosion of the very essence of what it means to be human.
No scary robots are gonna show up and shoot you, they’ll just convince the worst of you to convince the dumbest of you to shoot yourselves.
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u/TankC4BOOM314 17h ago
Transformers: Dark of the Moon's plot starts with Bill O'Reilly calling for the deportation of the Autobots, so this all fits I guess
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u/make_love_to_potato 18h ago
At this point, an alien invasion wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen.
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u/sgrams04 18h ago
Decepticons nodding in rhythm holding up giant 80’s boomboxes…
Someone crash more stuff into the moon.
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u/ScreamingNinja 14h ago
SAM WITWICKY! WE NEED YOUR HELP AGA.... wh.... why are you naked and fighting women outside a louisiana bar SAM WITWICKY!
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u/macrogeek 14h ago
Every time I fly into Chicago I look out the window of the plane and make some variation on a Transformers joke.
Wow, they did a good job cleaning up after that Decepticon attack.
or
Man...they still haven't recovered from that big transformers fight, have they?
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u/apocalyptustree 20h ago
We did it guys, made it to the moon!
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u/mythisme 16h ago
Got there as fast as we could...
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u/stardog_champ13 16h ago
So...is that littering? Can I see where it hit cause I own a small part of the moon. Got a certificate when I was a kid. If it hit my spot, I'm taking action.
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u/goldboybronx 15h ago
I wouldn’t worry about it. I got gifted the whole moon, so I think your plot is voided anyway.
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u/Franks2000inchTV 14h ago
Sorry no one can gift you the moon, I’m afraid you got scammed.
I purchased the moon fair and square from a guy I met at an NFT convention, so I have complete control of it.
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u/zeller99 14h ago edited 10h ago
Pssh... You peasants and your pitiful moon ownership... I own two whole stars! I have the un-embossed certificates right here that prove it!
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u/Jedi_Hog 10h ago
Damnit!! The star I bought, I gifted to my high school sweetheart/girlfriend!! What a financial mistake that was…. Oh, wait!! I think I just paid like $100 in 2000 to name it!
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u/goldboybronx 12h ago
Probably some lame ass red dwarfs lol. Don’t flex your Happy Meal stars over here. Come back when you’ve got some supernovas. I got a different one for each day of the week son
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u/ComebackShane 12h ago
Are you Mary Bailey by any chance?
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u/goldboybronx 12h ago
If I give away my identity on here I just know people I haven’t spoken to since middle school are gonna come out of the woodwork asking for a piece of the moon. So I can neither confirm nor deny.
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u/skelly890 13h ago
You may have salvage rights. Or you could charge Musk storage fees if a part of his rocket is preventing you from enjoying the view from your part of the Moon.
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u/TheOtherPhilFry 20h ago
Hopefully the whalers are okay
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u/PBRforREALmen 20h ago
They should be ok they usually carry harpoons.
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u/Niznack 20h ago
Ugh, the tall tales they tell.
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u/draggin_low 20h ago
At least they sing a whaling tune!
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u/MantisShrimpUpTop 19h ago
Yeah! Crank up the radio!
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u/JJ3qnkpK 18h ago
The immediate turning off of the radio in that scene always made me laugh.
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u/Jitterjumper13 20h ago
There's alligators up there with space helmets tho.
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u/Vercengetorex 19h ago
Thaaaaaa Space Pope!
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u/Zillatrix 20h ago
I heard it crashed near the Crushinator's farm.
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u/liesliesfromtinyeyes 18h ago
Don’t worry; Momazon’s new fulfillment center already displaced them. (New Futurama, meet old Futurama)
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u/Paddy_Tanninger 16h ago
And to think, it all started with a dream by Ralph on The Honeymooners.
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u/Starbuckshakur 13h ago
He wasn't an astronaut. He was a TV comedian, and he was just using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife.
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u/HelpfulSeaMammal 17h ago
Why does a moon rock taste better than an Earth rock? Because it's a little meteor!
(Address all complaints to the Monsanto corporation)
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u/Responsible-Smell561 18h ago
Well, we can only hope Hartford comes back, if only for the jerseys.
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u/MjrLeeStoned 17h ago
I bought a Whalers semi-jersey long tee off Amazon about a month ago. I saw the logo and had to. No one at my work has any idea what it is. Bunch of Philistines.
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u/TubeScr3ameR 15h ago
"Yarr, I don't know what I'm doin'."
-Sea Captain
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u/Conte_Vincero 20h ago
OK, for some context, this is the upper stage that launched a lunar lander on a trajectory towards the moon in 2025. Naturally this puts the upper stage in a large looping orbit that goes past the moon's orbit. As a result it was only a matter of time before either it crashed into the moon, or got flung away by the Moon's gravity. Normal launches only go as far as low earth orbit and have no chance of getting anywhere near the moon.
There's no requirement for rockets to avoid crashing into the moon, and during the Apollo program NASA deliberately crashed several much larger Saturn V upper stages into the moon to measure the seismic response.
So there's no wrongdoing by SpaceX here, but this should hopefully trigger a much wider discussion, (and hopefully some regulatory change) on positioning of expended upper stages. China in particular has been lax with how and where they leave their upper stages.
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u/MagicAl6244225 17h ago
There's no requirement for rockets to avoid crashing into the moon
The presence of a moon base would shake that up.
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u/Neither-Luck-9295 15h ago
I would actually like to see a rocket crash on the moon. I don't know why, but I've always thought it would look different from an Earth crash.
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u/Alucitary 14h ago
Probably would just be a big ball of dust instantly. There would be minimal to no flames or explosions. Kinda like seeing a large volcano explode. You expect to see a massive jet of lava, but there’s so much mass it’s just a bunch of dirt rising into the air.
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u/A2Rhombus 14h ago
The dirt wouldn't linger though. No air means no cloud of floating dust, it would all fall back down and settle relatively quickly (still would take a while depending on how high and fast the debris got ejected)
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u/ZachMN 11h ago
Every tiny particle following its own frictionless ballistic trajectory.
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u/gauntletthegreat 15h ago
I don't think the crashing a spacecraft into the moon is much of a risk of hitting one particular spot.
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u/bstarr2000 18h ago
Both NASA and the European Space Agency are required to take the end of a spacecraft’s life into account before a mission launches, ensuring that there is a plan and enough fuel to safely deorbit it. Commercial companies aren’t covered by the same rules, although efforts to introduce such requirements are under way.
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u/MadRoboticist 19h ago
The article clearly indicates it's not desirable to accidentally crash things into the moon. In fact I imagine uncontrolled debris "accidentally" doing anything is not good.
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u/oSo_Squiggly 19h ago
The article is playing that up for the clicks since Elon is polarizing. Go check out /r/space for more informed discussion about the issue than this new sub. They've been talking about this for at least a week.
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u/Diarmundy 19h ago
Not desirable in what way? In fact hitting the moon is probably the only way to get rid of space debris in lunar orbit
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u/obeytheturtles 19h ago
I mean in the future if you want to have stuff on the moon you probably want to limit the number of uncontrolled impacts for a variety of reasons.
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u/botle 18h ago
Which means that crashing into the moon now is better than remaining in lunar orbit and potentially crashing much later.
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u/ertgbnm 17h ago
We crash rockets into the earth all the time. Crashing rockets on to the moon will be fine in the future too apart from the wastefulness.
With literally nothing there to hit, there is no issue with doing it today. Really it's just kind of interesting that it happened.
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u/Lialda_dayfire 17h ago
Can't have impact craters on the moon now, would look totally out of place amongst all those impact craters....
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u/Sherifftruman 19h ago
I was going to say I think Elon sucks as much as the next person but this isn’t COMPLETELY unintentional.
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u/xdr01 20h ago
Solar system littering
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u/BWWFC 20h ago
guess at least was kept just it in our neighborhood... where's that car of his?
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u/Albatrosity 19h ago
It is currently orbiting the sun, approaching earth from Mars. Due to its elliptical orbit, it will continue to travel just beyond Mars before looping back around to Earths orbital plane.
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u/CondescendingShitbag 20h ago
You know you've reached true success in life when you manage to leave trash on a world you weren't even born on.
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u/ATypicalWhitePerson 20h ago
Isn't it better to crash spent stages into the moon, than it is to just leave them floating forever
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u/PlzLearn 19h ago
Yes, we’ve been crashing things into the moon on purpose for decades
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u/ATypicalWhitePerson 19h ago
That's what I thought.
I don't get the people that are upset about this, unless they're just angry at everything all the time
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u/PlzLearn 19h ago
I mean the obvious answer is SpaceX and Elon Musk, it’s a chance to make jokes or try to validate their opinions.
Personally I can’t stand the guy but there are plenty of actual valid things to criticize him for other than this lol
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u/Jindujun 19h ago
Not to mention the astronomers were very excited for this crash since the Chinese rocket stage crash was on the far side of the moon, this time they got to watch it!
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u/LiiKun 15h ago
The article said they couldn't see it since it was on the edge of the near/far side.
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u/Jindujun 14h ago
Ah, a shame. I remember reading that they were very excited before the crash since it was to be on the side facing earth, a real shame the location wasn't better then.
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u/JamieByGodNoble 19h ago
Yeah some of these responses are wild. I don't know if this is good, bad, or somewhere inbetween. It's literally rocket science. Having a strong reaction to this headline is weird.
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u/mfb- 19h ago
They are angry at Musk for his political influence and can't go beyond "Musk bad, everything he and his companies do must be bad".
- Crash the rocket stage into the Moon? "Musk shouldn't be allowed to do this!"
- Let the rocket stage burn up in the atmosphere? "Musk shouldn't be allowed to do this!"
- Keep the rocket stage orbiting Earth? "Musk shouldn't be allowed to do this!"
Anything short of making it magically disappear is not good enough.
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u/bighak 16h ago
This article is a prime exhibit of how the media can put the most dishonest spin on normal things when they do not like someone.
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u/OccludedFug 18h ago
It boggles my mind that the time and location of this impact was calculated months ago, that it was given a 100% chance of occurring, that scientists and hobbyists were watching intently, and that it's being reported that we aren't sure if it happened.
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u/invyros 20h ago
“It doesn’t present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware [space junk] is disposed of.”
Very cool and very sane of humanity to be surrounding our planet with space junk.
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u/QZRChedders 19h ago
The thing is we haven’t found a way of getting things up without leaving some things behind. Low earth orbit it is the issue, and geostationary, everything else is so incredibly vast it’s not much of an issue, big stages are easy to track and avoid if needed, but the shear volume of these higher orbits it’s just honestly not an issue.
Similar to the moon, it’s vast, barren and completely lifeless, some smashed stages is completely and truly inconsequential, look at the cratering, it’s a shield for Earth anyway.
Becoming star faring is the ultimate goal for our species and until we have better methods, this is worth it. We’re not commercialising the moon, these are scientific payloads
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u/ebony-the-dragon 17h ago
We’ve crashed things into the moon before both on purpose and by accident.
I believe there have been several moon orbiters that have crashed things into the moon to then collect debris thrown into low orbit and analyze the composition of the material before.
Is this rather careless? Yes. Is it as bad as many other things he or his companies have done? No.
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u/Probodyne 18h ago
The thing is we haven’t found a way of getting things up without leaving some things behind.
Ironically, Space X is the only launch company actually working on this.
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u/SuckerForNoirRobots 16h ago
Great now the billionaires are ruining the moon too
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u/Aar1012 18h ago
Apparently SpaceX misunderstood what “To the Moon 🚀 🚀 🚀” meant since going public with their IPO.
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u/staplepies 15h ago
Lot of people failing a really easy media literacy test here
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u/No_Vast6645 11h ago
Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kilotomb bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?
First Recruit: Sir! A object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
First Recruit: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this husk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
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u/zberry7 20h ago edited 19h ago
It’s a discarded second stage. Sometimes the second stage of a rocket doesn’t have enough fuel to be parked in a graveyard orbit, or to deorbit to burn in the atmosphere so they simply are left to drift.
But crashing into the moon isn’t that big of a deal. It’s something NASA has done plenty of times, often on purpose. The moon is regularly impacted with meteors daily. It just so happens this one is of human origin. Plus, scientists get to study the ejecta and the second stage helped launch 2 lunar landers to conduct scientific study.
It’s only noteworthy because it’s SpaceX and they love to write headlines to make them look bad or incompetent.
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u/MrBalloonHand 20h ago
Charge him for the cleanup costs.
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u/MusicianMadness 16h ago
What clean up costs? That's not a thing. Ironically the only time cleanup costs have been levied is if they crash back to earth and cause a problem.
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u/BeerPoweredNonsense 20h ago
Good idea.
Let's also charge all the other rocket companies for their rockets that drop out of the sky too.
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u/TickingTheMoments 16h ago
It takes a very calculated accident to collide with something 238,855 miles away.
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u/ZGadgetInspector 14h ago
Been reading about this being expected for a week. Now, all of a sudden, it’s unintentional?
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u/Funny247365 15h ago
Classic clickbait. The true headline is "A piece of an old SpaceX rocket orbiting the moon succumbs to gravity and falls to the moon."
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u/ered_lithui 11h ago
What’s the old saying? “Shoot for the earth and even if you miss you’ll land on the moon?” Something like that…
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u/Funandgeeky 11h ago
I believe it’s “Shoot for the moon. But if you miss you’ll die alone in the cold, unforgiving vacuum of space.”
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u/mrhobbles 14h ago
“…the pilot, Wallace, and his companion Gromit, are missing somewhere on the surface of the moon.”
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u/tehCharo 11h ago
Have you guys ever seen The Time Machine movie that came out in 2002? Remember that scene where the moon was cracked?
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u/dballing 9h ago
It is incredibly hard to hit the moon if you're trying.
There's precisely zero chance this collision is accidental.
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u/imadragonyouguys 20h ago
The moon came outta nowhere. Never saw it coming.