Our rockets. We’ve even started leaving debris on the Moon. A global protocol is urgently needed

In the early hours of yesterday, a section of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket – as big as a bus and weighing around four tonnes – landed on the Moon’s surface after drifting through space for over a year. The fragment was the upper stage of the launch vehicle used in January last year to carry two commercial landers to the Moon. After completing its task, it was left without a controllable trajectory and was drawn by the Moon’s gravitational pull until it impacted at a speed of around 8,700 kilometres per hour. The crater left by Elon Musk’s rocket, near the Einstein crater – that is, on the side of the Moon visible from Earth – was observed by thousands of scientists and enthusiasts around the world, as every impact generates a significant amount of data.

This is not the first human mark on the lunar surface: over the years, various missions, such as the American Apollo programme, had deliberately crashed certain stages of their rockets onto the Moon for scientific experiments. But the difference this time is that no one had planned for that piece of metal to end up exactly there. The Moon is once again becoming an arena of strategic competition, but the rules that should govern human activities in space have remained stuck in an era when there were few space programmes, most of which were government-run.

China now regards space as one of the key arenas of competition with the United States: the Chang’e lunar programme has enabled Beijing to establish an independent scientific and technological presence, whilst the International Lunar Research Station, developed jointly with Russia, aims to create an alternative to the US Artemis programme. Everyone wants to transform the Moon from an occasional destination into a place of permanent presence, but this new race brings with it the fundamental problem of space debris and abandoned infrastructure on the Moon. It would be useful to discuss this further.