We’re Launching So Much Stuff At The Moon That We’re Littering It With Space Junk Now

Earth used to look pretty nice, until all the trash arrived. But now, having already strewn plastic waste across land and sea, humanity has turned its gaze to the stars. Specifically, the U.S. and China are in a race to put astronauts back on the Moon. And where our proud species goes, blessed with intellect and reason, so too goes our trash. 

Astronomer Bill Gray has determined that a stray SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage is about to crash onto the lunar surface. It is not the first, and it will not be the last. For his Project Pluto, Gray calculates that the SpaceX space junk will strike the Moon in the vicinity of the Einstein crater on August 5, 2026. 

This was a piece of the mission equipment that launched Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, as well as ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 2. These were both commercial Moon landers designed to deposit scientific payloads (though the Hakuto-R crashed). It should be mentioned that these landers, as all others before them, also become a type of Moon junk once their missions are complete. Humanity has sent much more to the lunar surface than it has ever brought back.

The Falcon 9’s upper stage, however, was simply discarded into space once it had sent the landers on their way. It was pretty much just forgotten at that point. Gray, however, tracks man-made objects in space and spent the last few months confirming the rocket’s demise. Inadvertently caught by the Moon’s gravity, it will strike it at 5,400 mph. Oops.

Humanity, sadly, does have a long tradition of littering on the Moon. As Gray notes, the upper stages for Apollo 13 and Apollo 17 are also lying in the magnificent desolation right now; these were planned, not accidental. In 2009, NASA intentionally rammed an upper stage into the Moon for science, trying to access ice. But things took a turn for the worse in 2022, when a Chinese rocket hit the Moon by accident. Now, we’ll be getting humanity’s second accident later this year via SpaceX.

Space is getting congested with man-made creations at an exponential rate, as the number of rocket launches per year goes through, well, the atmosphere. If the throwaway stages of these rockets aren’t handled with proper diligence, the odds of them going where they shouldn’t go up, too. Fortunately, these things are mostly designed to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere if they come this way. But if they get caught by the Moon, the airless celestial body just has to receive them as trash.

If you’re thinking that it should be illegal to ruin the Moon, the good news is, it sort of is! The foundational document of space law is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by the member nations of the UN. The treaty stipulates that travelers to our closest celestial-body neighbor must “conduct exploration… so as to avoid their harmful contamination.” SpaceX didn’t intend to litter the Moon, but through negligence, you could argue it’s violating the treaty. Of course, the treaty is meant for nation-states, and it doesn’t have much in the way of enforcement mechanisms.

If SpaceX, or for that matter China’s space program, did want to avoid harmful moon contamination, the best way to do it would be to fling their rocket stages into solar orbit. Journeying around the Sun, these objects wouldn’t return to our neck of the woods for hundreds or even thousands of years. You could argue that’s just kicking the can down the road, but that’s quite a kick.

Otherwise, falling space junk might just become a life or death situation, given that America and China are both trying to establish Moon bases with permanent residence. That is a daunting enough task as it is without the threat of a stray rocket stage falling on an astronaut’s head.

h/t Space.com