A discarded rocket stage, left to drift through the gravitational currents of space for eighteen months, has written itself into the lunar surface near Einstein Crater — an unintended monument to the growing tension between humanity's ambitions beyond Earth and its habits of leaving things behind. The school-bus-sized Falcon 9 upper stage, remnant of a January 2025 lunar lander mission, struck the Moon at nearly nine thousand kilometres per hour on August 5th, its plume briefly illuminating questions about stewardship that the space age has long deferred. A Chilean telescope caught the chemica