A piece of a SpaceX rocket the size of a five-storey building and travelling at 8,700km per hour plummeted into the Moon on Wednesday, leaving a crater that could remain there for millions of years.
Nasa scientists rushed to reassure us that we on Earth were not in danger. “For comparison, a meteoroid with the same energy as the upper stage hits the Moon about every six days, so the lunar surface is constantly absorbing impacts with the same force,” they shrugged. But the incident felt like a parable for the move-fast-and-break-things leadership style espoused by Elon Musk.
While we may be safe from this particular piece of space junk, the reckless, buccaneering spirit that sent this sprawling tangle of metal on a collision course with the Moon has already left a trail of destruction here on Earth. And now we may all inadvertently own a piece of it, as SpaceX creeps into the index funds many of our pensions are built on.
The projectile that hit the Moon was the spent part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched in January of last year carrying two lunar landers as payload. The 4000kg stage, the engines and fuel that get the rocket into orbit, was then discarded and left drifting in a long looping orbit that eventually set it on an unplanned high-speed collision course with the Moon.
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This isn’t the first big incident for Musk’s space company. The next generation after the Falcon 9 is expected to be the Starship, a rocket Musk said a decade ago would have people on Mars by 2025. Since then, tests of the rocket have repeatedly ended in explosions; prototypes have unexpectedly burst into flames more than a dozen times, interrupting commercial air travel and sending shrapnel into Mexico that its government is investigating for contamination.
While there are mechanical explanations for many of these problems at Musk’s company, the underlying issue may be what Reuters called “the price for the billionaire’s push to colonise space at breakneck speed”. That was said in the context of high levels of workplace injuries at the firm; investigators found evidence of 600 serious workplace injuries over the course of about 10 years, including broken bones, amputations, head injuries, crushed fingers and hands and one death. In the case of the fatality, American health and safety officials found serious violations. Co-workers complained to inspectors that they had no convenient access to safety equipment, and not enough processes or oversight.
Musk, who has been in the Silicon Valley milieu since the mid-1990s, adopted the same move-fast-and-break-things attitude when he was put in charge of a new US government agency last year. The Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), the agency US president Donald Trump let him invent and name after an outdated dog meme, cut about 400,000 federal jobs, dismantled public investment in science, and wreaked havoc on the global public health and aid system, undermining efforts to fight HIV and other diseases. Evidence suggests it was all done with minimal forethought, underskilled workers, and claims that have proven to be untrue. And in the end it doesn’t seem to have saved all that much money.
One might expect a chief executive to be concerned about their company’s property creating a lasting 18m wide, 4m deep gash on the Moon. But on Wednesday, Musk seemed unperturbed. Most of his tweets that day on X were about advances in Grok. Grok is Musk’s AI product under investigation in multiple jurisdictions, including Ireland, for the generation of deepfake sexual images of real people without their consent. His one tweet alluding to the collision was a fake, AI-generated video of an object crashing into the Moon that he reposted without comment from an account called “@Valuetainment”.
His nonchalance is perhaps a reflection of his expectation, learned from so many previous instances, that recklessness is not a punishable offence for billionaires.
You might expect Nasa to have an opinion on lunar vandalism, but the agency is also now dependent on SpaceX for its transportation. And so it led with the “no danger to Earth” line and the suggestion that perhaps something could be learned from examining before and after images of the collision.
This regulatory indifference – or rather, enabling – has also been seen in the finance sector’s response to the listing of the SpaceX company on the Stock Exchange last June. There is normally a one-year wait period before stock indices let newly listed companies join their portfolio. An index is a basket of stocks that accounts for large parts of passive investing in things like ETFs and mutual funds, which make up most of our pension portfolios. Wait periods are supposed to help avoid the early price volatility that accompanies new company listings, which makes sense; SpaceX surged after its launch and has since dropped by about 50 per cent.
But three of the four main index gatekeepers – FTSE Russell, Nasdaq 100 and CRSP/Morningstar – rewrote their rules in advance of SpaceX’s IPO to allow the company to join early. Only the S&P 500 index stood mostly firm, retaining its 12-month seasoning period. This rare pushback on the world’s richest man has bought those of us in Ireland who are not overjoyed at the prospect of owning a part of his empire some time; according to Tom Clinch of Clinch Wealth Management, most Irish pensions tend to focus on the S&P 500 stocks for their US exposure. This buys us a few more months.
Next Wednesday between 6pm and 8pm, as we find ourselves looking up in wonder at the Moon as it momentarily blocks out the sun during the partial solar eclipse, we’d do well to remember that newest lunar scar, and how the miles between us and it are littered with space junk and the price that is already being paid for Musk’s man-child fantasies of the rockets he will launch, the space colonies he will build, the data centres that will be suspended in orbit and the medical advances that can happen in zero gravity.
And then we should think about whether we’re content to let that same careless, wrecking ball attitude continue to have such a grip on life on Earth – on our pensions, our data, our energy infrastructure and our children’s futures.
