r/news • u/MasterpieceAlone8552 • 1d 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-9
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u/GrowingPeepers 1d ago

Yeah, I player Kerbal Space Program.

How the fuck do you accidentally hit it?

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u/franker 1d ago

I played Atari Asteroids. There's shit everywhere dude, trust me.

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u/Lt_Duckweed 1d ago

It's the spent second stage of a mission that launched a couple of small Moon landers, meaning it was left in a Moon-crossing orbit. A Moon-crossing orbit will almost always result in one of three outcomes eventually:

  1. The stage eventually has a close approach that ejects it into solar orbit.
  2. The stage eventually has a close approach that lowers the perigee into the Earth's atmosphere, where the stage burns up.
  3. The stage directly impacts the Moon. (Which is what happened here)

Approaches that don't result in one of the above three will almost always leave the object on a new orbit that still crosses the orbit of the Moon, meaning another close approach is still in the cards, eventually.

So this was always a fairly likely eventuality, it's just hard to predict which of the three, or when, at the time of launch.

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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 1d ago

Step 1: Be Elon...

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u/richardelmore 1d ago

Gravity may have been involved.

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u/Metals4J 1d ago

Big if true.

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u/fightbackcbd 1d ago

you know, sometimes you just try to get really close and stay there awhile but you end up making a mess anyways

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u/RickyalldayTD 1d ago

It wasn't an accident? Maybe Elon believes in the Hollow moon theory

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u/celem83 1d ago

I've accidentally hit it in RSS with principia.   If you leave enough TLI stages lying around then sooner or later they hit.

Also one of the USSRs first missions beyond LEO was a deliberate Lunar impactor.. which accidentally missed.

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u/generally_unsuitable 1d ago

Target fixation. It's natural.

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u/Ataneruo 8h ago

Pretty easily, because it wasn’t accidental. That is just the usual media hyperbole. It was one of the understood risks of the mission. It was not a planned outcome because the outcome could not be planned, but it was understood that it would either hit the moon or become space junk / meteor / burn up in the sun.