In the early days of March, a SpaceX rocket booster is expected to crash into the surface of the Moon just north of its equator. Part of a rocket launched in 2015, the booster has been floating around ever since.
In general, the Moon has not been used for trash storage beyond the lunar missions. Moreover, SpaceX likes to be known for landing its boosters back on Earth rather than sending them off into the wild blue (or black) yonder.
This could be an opportunity for SpaceX to claim it has created one of the first unintentional man-made craters on the Moon. The small crater could be known as the Musk Mini-Basin.
Luckily, Mr. Musk’s Tesla Roadster, launched in 2018, made it past the Moon with little incident (and then overshot Mars). We did not need an Elon Musk Parking Lot on the moon, yet the little red car would have been quite a sight for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
Extra: Visit this Sky & Telescope story for LRO images of the six Apollo landing sites on the Moon.
Update: Recent news indicates that the object about to hit the Moon is not a SpaceX rocket booster but rather a Chinese rocket part from the Long March 3C that launched the Chang’e 5-T1 lunar mission. I guess we will need to rethink the naming of that new crater.
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