SPACEX ACHIEVES MOON LANDING VIA HIGH-SPEED LITHOBRAKING
Company confirms rocket stage reached the Moon the way a rental car reaches valet parking.
The upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, adrift since a 2025 mission, made contact with the lunar surface early Wednesday at over 5,000 miles per hour, in what NASA astronomers had predicted for months and what SpaceX is now calling 'an unplanned but scientifically valuable lithobraking event.' Lithobraking, for the uninitiated, is the technical term for stopping a spacecraft by hitting a rock so large it has its own gravity.
NASA scientists say the resulting crater will provide valuable new data on the lunar subsurface, and grad students have already begun measuring it in 'Falcon-lengths' using laser pointers and the barely suppressed glee of people who did not have to build the rocket. 'This was always part of the data-collection envelope,' said a SpaceX spokesman, when asked whether the impact was intentional. 'The envelope just happened to be the Moon. We're not going to apologize for exceeding expectations by exceeding the surface.'
The spokesman declined to release the original flight plan, citing proprietary trajectory data and, sources suggest, a strong preference that nobody circle the word 'debris' in a company memo. The Moon has not issued a statement, but sources close to the Moon describe it as 'fine, structurally,' and 'used to this kind of thing from everybody except SpaceX.' NASA has requested first dibs on naming the crater; SpaceX has countered with 'Starman's Driveway.'
