alt Hacker NewsUpper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5
Comments
> Over 600 Falcon 9 rockets have been launched. Most of the upper stages are either in orbits close to the earth or have already re-entered the earth's atmosphere. A few are orbiting the sun. The object that will be hitting the moon has been orbiting the earth for a little over a year.
After so much time hearing about how SpaceX dumps rocket debris all over Boca Chica it's kind of amusing that they're also leaving trash on the moon. It would be cool if we sent people back to the moon one day and they took photos next to junk like this. Or whatever is left of it.
Welp, my initial thought based on the link was that this was part of Project Pluto:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
https://web.archive.org/web/20200329022906/http://www.merkle...
It is not... This is a Falcon-9 rocket stage, not a part from the Flying Crowbar or any similar nightmare-device.
Soon we'll need to call Roger Wilco to take care of all this junk.
something they didn't mention, what is in this upper stage? I'm presuming a rocket motor and some fuel is that right..? They do a calculation of energy release on impact, but I'm wondering if there is any fuel left and whether that would affect their equation?
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someone send them a littering bill
sadly one day hundreds of years from now parts of the moon will look like all the garbage left on Everest (and maybe even the dead frozen bodies too, moon dust is sticky and very sharp apparently)
> though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.
My thoughts exactly.
I love this page. Text, photos, links. Straight up HTML 4, maybe even using a template in a text editor and FTPed to go live. I didn't see any inline or referenced CSS. No scripts. No ads. No social junk. The home page even has a <table> just like it's 1994.
What are the drawbacks to reverting to this type web publishing? That's how I used to do things before publishing tools and CMS and platforms took over, but I know the security landscape has changed quite a bit, and such pages are always in the deep long tail of Google results (and therefore practically invisible to AI summaries, which often surface complete junk as sources).