On 5 August, a piece of a derelict SpaceX rocket traveling at 5,400 miles an hour met with the moon and punched a fresh hole into it near Einstein Crater. Astronomers were thrilled. The European Southern Observatory caught sodium and lithium flaring in the debris plume and called it a bonus. The media called it a light show. Nobody was physically hurt, so nobody is responsible, and within a week the story was gone.

I have spent 20 years tracking the junk humanity leaves behind in space for a living, and I want to tell you plainly what that crater actually is: a receipt. It’s what you get when an entire industry treats the sky, and now the moon, as a place to dump what it no longer wants, and calls the dumping “normal operations” or “space exploration”.

Here’s my thesis, and I won’t soften it: we don’t own the moon, but we’re behaving as though we did, and that behavior has a name. It’s the oldest colonial instinct there is, dressed up in aerospace engineering. Take what you want, leave what you don’t, and let someone else, or something else, absorb the cost.

Stewardship asks what we owe a place. Ownership asks what we can extract from it before anyone stops us. Right now, in cislunar space, ownership is winning by default, because nobody with power has bothered to claim the alternative, and power doesn’t reside in controlling outcomes but rather in the ability to make choices. Remember this.

So, let’s start with the plain facts of the object itself. The Falcon 9 upper stage that hit the moon launched in 2025 carrying lunar landers, finished its job, and was simply abandoned in a high orbit that happened to cross the moon’s path. Nobody designed a deliberate end for it. The curvature of spacetime and the sun’s radiation pressure did the steering instead, for months, until a predictable, computable trajectory ended predictably, in a fresh scar.

SpaceX didn’t choose to hit the moon. But it did not prevent the collision, which, in an industry with the money and the trajectory software to do otherwise, is likely a choice all the same. That is my first point, and it is not an isolated one. Companies have the power to not allow their rockets to hit the moon. Moreover, rocket bodies have hit the moon before, in 2022 and earlier still, and are always treated as curiosities rather than as pattern.

The pattern is the second point, and it’s where I stop being generous. Look at what we have already done to low Earth orbit, the space closest to home. Tens of thousands of tracked fragments, and uncountable smaller ones, now circle the planet because for 60 years, operators launched first and asked about disposal never. Abandonment is not disposal, but those with power have chosen it to be so.

Starlink alone accounts for more active satellites than the rest of the world’s operators combined, and its own operators report rising near misses as the constellation grows. We built that congestion through a very specific kind of confidence (aka hubris): the belief that space is big enough to absorb whatever we throw into it, forever, without a bill ever coming due.

It’s the same hubris a mining company has about a river, or a fleet has about a fishery, right up until the fish are gone. We are simply exporting the same appetite further out, because the moon, unlike the ocean or the atmosphere, has no way to fight back. No air to burn up what we drop on it. No tide to wash away what we leave behind. Whatever debris we send there is, for all practical purposes, permanent. You’ll still find bags of astronaut poop on the lunar surface from the Apollo program.

Which brings me to the third point, the one under all the others: why does this keep happening, when the physics has been understood for decades and the fixes are neither exotic nor expensive?

The honest answer is entitlement. Not carelessness – entitlement. There is a difference between not knowing better and knowing better and doing it anyway because nobody will stop you.

This is the same posture empires have always taken toward frontiers they didn’t build and don’t have to live inside the consequences of. Plant a flag, extract the value, leave the mess for whoever comes next, and call the mess someone else’s problem, or better yet, call it nobody’s problem, because there was never an owner to complain.

That isn’t a metaphor. It’s a fairly literal description of how spacefaring nations and companies currently treat the moon, a place that legally belongs to no one and is treated, in practice, as though it belongs to whoever gets there first with a bigger engine. People love to own the profits without owning the consequences of them left in their wake.

To be sure, I don’t think most of the engineers doing this work are villains, and I don’t think this particular impact was reckless in the way, say, a rocket exploding over the Caribbean and scattering debris over a populated area would be (wink). This piece of debris hit an empty stretch of lunar terrain in daylight, and it genuinely did hand scientists a rare, useful dataset. Some operators are also trying to do better. Companies now design certain missions with deliberate deorbit plans, and there is real, if slow, movement toward international norms for orbital debris mitigation.

I don’t want to pretend none of that exists. But good intentions from a minority don’t change the system’s default setting, and the default setting, according to recent evidence, is still: launch, abandon, hope nothing important gets hit. Isolated best practice is not governance. It is public relations for an industry that still has none.

So no, nobody owns the moon. Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no nation can claim it, and no company can either, whatever their marketing suggests about future colonies and mined regolith. But ownership was never really the problem. Nobody owned the lands where Native Americans thrived either. The problem is that we are acting out ownership’s oldest habits, extraction without accounting, expansion without consequence, on a body we all agreed, on paper, to hold in common.

A crater near Einstein Crater is a small thing by itself. What it represents is not small at all.

We have a narrow window left in which the moon still looks the way it has looked for billions of years, before the coming decade’s hundred-plus missions turn “who hit it this time” into a monthly headline instead of a rare one. We can spend that window building the tracking, the disposal rules, and the accountability that stewardship actually requires. Or we can keep doing what we did on 5 August: witness something we built come out of the dark, watch it hit a place we don’t own as if we did, and call it a light show.

• Moriba Jah is a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin