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The moon has a brand new crater as of Wednesday, thanks to a rogue SpaceX rocket that crashed into Earth’s nearest neighbor at 5,400 miles an hour. Originally part of a 2025 mission to launch a pair of lunar landers for U.S. and Japanese companies, the rocket was supposed to fall back to Earth. Instead, it strayed off course and eventually reached its final resting place on the moon’s surface.
According to the Guardian, astronomers were unable to confirm the impact, “possibly because the impact site was close to the visible edges of the moon.” A day later, a Korean lunar orbiter captured images of the impact, but it will still take time to confirm the size of the crater, which is expected to be about 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, for the record. In March 2022, a rocket slammed into the moon, creating a double crater about 95 feet wide. That object was later identified as part of China’s Long March 3C rocket, which propelled the Chang’e 5-T1 mission around the moon in 2014. In fact, there’s been trash on the moon ever since humans first landed there, which some scientists cite as evidence of the Anthropocene, a new geological era defined by how badly humans have messed up the planet and its nearby neighbors.
NEWS 🚨: A Korean lunar orbiter has photographed the crash site of a SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage on the Moon pic.twitter.com/chI8hpWdsv
— Latest in space (@latestinspace) August 6, 2026
Indeed, it’s difficult to estimate how space junk is currently orbiting our planet. By one count, there are more than 17,000 metric tons of objects in Earth orbit, including nearly 19,000 satellites. Every time we shoot more stuff up into space, we risk it hitting something else, as in a giant game of billiards. That threatens to create a cataclysmic chain reaction, in which every collision creates more space debris and also risks damaging satellites and space stations we’d like to keep operational. This might make future space launches unsafe (such as the planned Artemis IV moon landing mission) and could render GPS devices completely useless. If you think Google Maps is glitchy now, just wait.
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This hypothetical scenario is called Kessler Syndrome, but I propose renaming it Tesla Syndrome, given that Elon Musk’s Starlink has nearly 11,000 satellites in orbit, with eventual plans to launch as many as 42,000. Musk’s car is still floating out there somewhere, too. The statistical probability of a company owned by the world’s richest man making our space trash problem even worse is high, so we’d better keep crossing our fingers for more near misses — and, just maybe, a future in which humans behave less like slobs.
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