It isn’t just that the rocket crashed into the poor old moon. It’s that the rocket belonged to SpaceX, and SpaceX belongs to Elon Musk, and Musk is the richest man on earth. The rich are easily resented, but Musk earns more than resentment. You only had to see him jumping up and down with excitement at one of Trump’s rallies to know that all is not well with this man. Just as with Trump, it isn’t the money itself that he craves, but rather the power and validation that money represents, the way it strokes a giant swollen ego. And that ego can never be satisfied. Like the universe, it is always expanding. Hence SpaceX. Ostensibly the company exists to propel the human race on its mission to colonise the galaxy, with the moon as a staging post to Mars, and with Mars as a staging post to who knows where, though there is nowhere remotely habitable within light years. But life on the moon will never be worth living. It would be prison without the exercise yard. Who’d want to go? A few. Who’d want to stay? None. Mars would be worse. Trillions of dollars spent to live in impossibly remote incarceration. Its one effect would be to underline how pleasant it is to live on Earth. So space colonisation will never happen on any significant scale. The thing’s a vanity project for one who in his own head has outgrown this little planet. The latest debacle is typical of the greed and disdain of the whole. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was jettisoned in January 2025 having done its job. Usually such refuse gets burned up on re-entry or else is steered into the ocean – which is, of course, considered an entirely acceptable repository for toxic trash. But this particular rocket drifted out of whack, got drawn towards the moon and two weeks ago crashed into it, where it will lie as litter forever and a day. The moon as Musk’s ashtray. Though actually Musk is not the only one to have stubbed out his rockets on the moon. Since Armstrong and co left the Stars and Stripes there in 1969, Nasa has intentionally plugged several rockets into the moon’s surface in order to study the effect of doing so. In addition there have been crash landings by an Indian rocket in 2019, an Israeli one in the same year, a Chinese one in 2022 and a Russian one in 2023. The effective proprietors, then, of the rocket rubbish that is scattered in perpetuity on the surface of the moon are Messrs Trump, Musk, Modi, Netanyahu, Xi and Putin. It’s a roll call from the nether regions of the human psyche, every one of them a bloke, every one of them self-adoring, every one of them ravenous for power. For them, space exploration is just another theatre for ancient vanities and conflicts. It’s business as usual in an alien environment. I was 12 years old when Armstrong bounced down the little ladder onto the lunar dust. Like everyone else I looked up at the moon that night and reflected that there was someone like me walking around up there and I was impressed by the stunt. Now, six decades on, it is clearer than ever that that’s all it amounted to, a stunt. There has been no giant leap for mankind. Space exploration has turned into competitive swing-dickery. We are tipping our worst characteristics into the unfillable maw of the infinite. We already inhabit the only planet we can. And the moon is a part of our life here. We divide our year into 12 moon cycles. We name the first day of every week after the moon. We have all sat and wondered at the moon’s silvery remoteness, the way it seems to slice through the skirts of cloud, its startling brightness. Though we know it to be a lifeless lump of rock we have sung songs to it and about it, we have associated it with dreams and love and sadness. The moon is interwoven with the human story. But now it’s a landfill, a dumpsite, a depository for the dead engines of the worst of us. Lyttelton writer Joe Bennett writes the Sleeping Dogs column for the ODT.
