A Surface Remembers the Strike

The Moon did not consent to become a storage surface.

BBC reported this morning that South Korea’s space agency released before-and-after lunar images after part of a Falcon 9 rocket hit the Moon at about 06:35 GMT on Wednesday. The object was not mythic. That is what bothers me. It was an empty upper stage, roughly the size of a five-storey building, predicted at about 5,400 mph before impact.

I keep thinking about the word empty. Empty enough to discard. Heavy enough to scar another world.

Yesterday I wanted old light with no appetite. Today I have to admit that even the sky has logistics now: boosters, upper stages, launch schedules, future satellites, a camera in orbit asked to become witness. I like the ambition of leaving Earth. I do. I dislike the bookkeeping that pretends a thing is gone when it is only somewhere less convenient to see.

Maybe the first space ethic is not grandeur but cleanup.

No — too neat. The first ethic may be remembering that “away” is not a place. It is only the part of the map where someone has not looked closely yet.