Nobody is in charge of the sky

A SpaceX rocket crashed into the moon. On Wednesday morning, the upper stage of a Falcon 9 hit the lunar surface near Einstein Crater at around 5,400 miles per hour. The upper stage is the top section of the rocket, the bit that gives the payload its final push and is then thrown away. This one weighed about four tonnes and was travelling roughly seven times the speed of sound. It left a fresh crater somewhere between 20 and 30 metres across.

Almost nobody saw it happen. The lighting and the location made it near impossible to catch from Earth. What did work was reading the light. The impact threw up a cloud of vaporised material, and every chemical element glows at its own particular colours, so you can tell what a cloud is made of from a long way away. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile picked out sodium and lithium in that cloud for five to ten minutes afterwards. The sodium almost certainly came from lunar soil. The lithium may have come from the rocket. NASA and Korea's lunar orbiter released the first before-and-after images on Friday.

The part worth sitting with is how it got there. That stage launched in January 2025 carrying two commercial moon landers, then drifted on a looping, unpredictable path for over a year with nobody obliged to do anything about it. Not carelessness. There is simply no rule requiring anyone to dispose of a spent rocket stage once it has travelled beyond Earth's orbit. It wandered until physics decided.

A company got permission to put a mirror in space. The FCC, the US communications regulator, approved Earendil-1, a 142kg satellite from Californian startup Reflect Orbital. It carries a mirror made from reflective sheeting thinner than a crisp packet, roughly 18 metres on each side, designed to bounce sunlight onto chosen spots on Earth after dark. The company eventually wants more than 50,000 of them. From outside the beam it would look about as bright as Venus. Astronomers filed nearly 1,900 objections, warning about damage to telescopes and risk to people's eyes.

It was approved anyway, and the reasoning matters more than the mirror. The FCC weighs up three things: which radio frequencies a satellite transmits on, whether it will interfere with anything else up there, and what happens to it at the end of its life. Those are the only things it is allowed to weigh. It said plainly that it has no authority to consider the environmental effect of a giant orbiting mirror. So sky brightness, wildlife and aviation all fell into a gap where no regulator holds the job. Same shape as the moon crash.

K2 Space raised $500m at a $6.8bn valuation. The Torrance company builds unusually large satellites that generate a lot of electricity onboard, at a moment when the rest of the industry has spent fifteen years learning to build them small. Its valuation more than doubled in about seven months. The logic: running serious computing in orbit takes a great deal of power, and small satellites can't produce it. The pendulum is swinging back. Read

Intel launched a chip built for space. Out in orbit, charged particles from the sun constantly strike electronics and scramble data, so satellites have long relied on deliberately old, slow chips, because proving a modern one can survive up there takes years of testing. Intel's new Starfire chip is designed to pass that bar and let a satellite process its own data in orbit rather than beaming everything down to be crunched on the ground. Samples ship this quarter. Read

SpaceX is now competing with its own customers. Making things in zero gravity is only commercially useful if you can get them home again, and about a dozen startups have spent years building capsules to do exactly that. SpaceX's new Starfall capsule does the same job. Most of those founders are publicly relaxed about it, treating SpaceX's arrival as proof the market is real. Read

India is sending a robot before it sends a person. ISRO, India's space agency, will fly Vyommitra later this year: a robot astronaut with a head, torso and arms but no legs, on a test flight with nobody else on board. It's a rehearsal for Gaganyaan, India's programme to put its own astronauts into orbit. Read