Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

tempodox a minute ago | parent | next [-]

> though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.

My thoughts exactly.

ilamont 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I love this page. Text, photos, links. Straight up HTML 4, maybe even using a template in a text editor and FTPed to go live. I didn't see any inline or referenced CSS. No scripts. No ads. No social junk. The home page even has a <table> just like it's 1994.

What are the drawbacks to reverting to this type web publishing? That's how I used to do things before publishing tools and CMS and platforms took over, but I know the security landscape has changed quite a bit, and such pages are always in the deep long tail of Google results (and therefore practically invisible to AI summaries, which often surface complete junk as sources).

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sheept an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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xnx an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Having that not be the browser default was a good idea in 2008, but not now.

	▲	account42 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It wasn't a good idea even in 2008.

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recursive 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This sounds like a critique of mobile browsers. Make friendliness the default!

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Krssst an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Firefox's reader mode works really well on the article, I wonder why it's not the default for unstyled pages.

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burkaman an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's obviously not designed for mobile but I wouldn't call it unfriendly, it's still fast and pretty easy to read. It also works perfectly with Firefox reader mode.

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barbazoo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a feature for me, not a bug. Not everything has to be everything-friendly all the time, especially if it makes it easier to consume content or stuff.

Edit: I'm forgetting about certain accessibility issues, although I'm not sure this plain page isn't a good fit for accessibility tools.

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barbazoo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And it's so fast even with pictures. I miss the old internet.

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deadbabe 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

You could easily make a browser extension that passes each page through an AI agent that will rewrite the page in the given style. It’s fun.

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dopamean 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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tekla 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	lastofthemojito 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I believe it's actually unresolved whether NASA left poop on the moon or not: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/37952/did-apollo-l...

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sixtyj an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Over 600 Falcon 9 rockets have been launched. Most of the upper stages are either in orbits close to the earth or have already re-entered the earth's atmosphere. A few are orbiting the sun. The object that will be hitting the moon has been orbiting the earth for a little over a year.

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norenh 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Welp, my initial thought based on the link was that this was part of Project Pluto:

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

https://web.archive.org/web/20200329022906/http://www.merkle...

It is not... This is a Falcon-9 rocket stage, not a part from the Flying Crowbar or any similar nightmare-device.

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glimshe 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Soon we'll need to call Roger Wilco to take care of all this junk.

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clort an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

something they didn't mention, what is in this upper stage? I'm presuming a rocket motor and some fuel is that right..? They do a calculation of energy release on impact, but I'm wondering if there is any fuel left and whether that would affect their equation?

	▲	tekla 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I can't really think of much besides maybe some batteries. The fuel and oxidizer are supposed to be dumped shortly after payload deployment to prevent any issues with blowing up. Even if it wasn't dumped, its been a year, so it would have boiled off.

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ck2 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

someone send them a littering bill

sadly one day hundreds of years from now parts of the moon will look like all the garbage left on Everest (and maybe even the dead frozen bodies too, moon dust is sticky and very sharp apparently)