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Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

projectpluto.com

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Re: Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

#81

Post by asdff »

pynappo wrote: post #67
Rebelgecko wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my screen it fit perfectly after double tapping

I mean it fits, but i don't find the text size particularly usable for mobile On vivaldi mobile on an android phone (with an approximately 6x3" display), i see this as the first line: > On 2026 August 5, within a few minutes of 06:35 UTC, an upper stage (section) of a rocket used for a lunar mission will hit the And for me, reading a 124 character wide line on a 3" wide screen (75mmish) is not particularly comfortabl…

When oriented horizontally, the text becomes larger than a lot of the ios system text size

Re: Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

#82

Post by ggreer »

bmitc wrote: post #66
ggreer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moon is a lifeless rock with nobody on it. That seems like a better place for garbage to go than the earth. And since it's going to impact the moon at 2.43km/sec, I don't think there will be much visible stuff remaining, just a crater and some bits of aluminum. Also what's the alternative? Moon missions don't have enough extra propellant to go back to earth and deorbit. They might have enough to move to a relativ…

> lifeless rock Do you know that for a fact? Unlikely sure, but the question isn't helped by ramming a thing that might have Earth-born life on it into it.

Yes. There is no liquid water on the moon. There is no atmosphere. No life can exist there.

The moon is struck by meteors quite frequently. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter noticed 200 new craters over seven years.[1] Compared to what nature does to the surface, a few rocket bodies and impactor probes is a rounding error.

1. https://lroc.im-ldi.com/images/943

Re: Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

#83

Post by lenkite »

xnx wrote: post #7
sheept wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main drawback with the page's unstyled design is that the page is not mobile friendly. Publishing web pages by manually editing HTML files is still very common today; any GitHub Pages blog does this.

is the only thing keeping this page from being mobile friendly. Having that not be the browser default was a good idea in 2008, but not now.

Never understood why we need to add this ridiculous tag for mobile. CSS/HTML are responsive by default.

Re: Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

#84

Post by ASalazarMX »

lenkite wrote: post #83
xnx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is the only thing keeping this page from being mobile friendly. Having that not be the browser default was a good idea in 2008, but not now.

Never understood why we need to add this ridiculous tag for mobile. CSS/HTML are responsive by default.

But tables are not. The widest row overrides the rest, making everything else tiny.

Re: Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

#85

Post by bmitc »

ggreer wrote: post #82
bmitc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lifeless rock Do you know that for a fact? Unlikely sure, but the question isn't helped by ramming a thing that might have Earth-born life on it into it.

Yes. There is no liquid water on the moon. There is no atmosphere. No life can exist there. The moon is struck by meteors quite frequently. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter noticed 200 new craters over seven years.[1] Compared to what nature does to the surface, a few rocket bodies and impactor probes is a rounding error. 1. https://lroc.im-ldi.com/images/943

> There is no liquid water on the moon.

That is not definitive. There is frozen water and even water that sublimates on the bright side of the Moon. And the internal core of the Moon is quite hot. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that there are pockets of liquid water.

> Compared to what nature does to the surface, a few rocket bodies and impactor probes is a rounding error.

It's not an excuse. I also didn't comment about the impact itself, although it would be interesting to see a comparison to the meteors it gets hit by compared to the rocket shell, comparing speeds and size.

Re: Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

#86

Post by ggreer »

bmitc wrote: post #85
ggreer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. There is no liquid water on the moon. There is no atmosphere. No life can exist there. The moon is struck by meteors quite frequently. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter noticed 200 new craters over seven years.[1] Compared to what nature does to the surface, a few rocket bodies and impactor probes is a rounding error. 1. https://lroc.im-ldi.com/images/943

> There is no liquid water on the moon. That is not definitive. There is frozen water and even water that sublimates on the bright side of the Moon. And the internal core of the Moon is quite hot. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that there are pockets of liquid water. > Compared to what nature does to the surface, a few rocket bodies and impactor probes is a rounding error. It's not an excuse. I also didn't…

I was obviously referring to the surface of the moon, where impacts happen. It is impossible for liquid water to exist on or near the surface, as the lack of atmosphere means that water either freezes or sublimes (and is then split into hydrogen & oxygen atoms by solar wind, causing the hydrogen to escape into space).

Yes, it is physically possible for liquid water to exist deep below the poles of the moon, but it would escape over time. Since there’s no way for any underground water to be replenished, and the moon is slowly cooling, it is very likely that all water on the moon is in non-liquid form (either ice, chemically bound up in rocks, or trace amounts of vapor that is soon to escape into space).

Meteors impact at 5-10x the velocity of the rocket body, meaning they have 12-50x more kinetic energy for the same mass. Their sizes vary, but a 4 ton booster traveling at 2.43km/sec is not going to be the most energetic impact on the moon this year.

Re: Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

#87

Post by ButlerianJihad »

tekla wrote: post #21
dopamean wrote: post #18

After so much time hearing about how SpaceX dumps rocket debris all over Boca Chica it's kind of amusing that they're also leaving trash on the moon. It would be cool if we sent people back to the moon one day and they took photos next to junk like this. Or whatever is left of it.

You realize we've been smashing shit into the moon since Apollo right? Also you know the literal trash bags of trash and poop that Apollo dumped overboard. This smashing into the the moon will leave a random crater, and last time I checked, lots of craters on the moon.

The Soviet Union was quite busy with their Luna program which made lunar impacts commonplace, including

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15

Luna 15 was not only in lunar orbit at the same time as Apollo 11, but also sent to crash into Mare Crisium while USA astronauts were still on the surface at Tranquility Base.

Re: Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

#88

Post by 47635274172635 »

whatsupdog wrote: post #55
dopamean wrote: post #18

After so much time hearing about how SpaceX dumps rocket debris all over Boca Chica it's kind of amusing that they're also leaving trash on the moon. It would be cool if we sent people back to the moon one day and they took photos next to junk like this. Or whatever is left of it.

This "trash" could provide a lot of valuable metal and maybe other stuff, for future moon missions. I wouldn't really call it trash.

[dead]

Re: Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

#89

Post by account42 »

phoghed wrote: post #77
account42 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, all the meta tag does is tell mobile browsers to follow the standard as written before they existed. They should just do that by default.

Because it wouldn’t work for every website and the web almost never breaks backward compatibility.

It would work a lot better than what mobile browsers are doing now. The only websites that can be argued to be helped by that were those with fixed table layouts - but those are still pretty unusable even with the standards-noncompliant hack. And websites that were mobile-compatible before like plain HTML sites like the TFA are needlessly broken.
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