A discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage will slam into the moon at 5,400 mph around 2:35 a.m. Eastern Wednesday, and the establishment press is framing routine orbital mechanics as an environmental crime—while burying the fact that NASA did the exact same thing on purpose in 2009.

The roughly four-ton booster was left in a high-Earth orbit after launching two lunar landers on Jan. 15, 2025. Solar activity and gravitational forces pushed it onto a lunar collision course. SpaceX's director of NASA Science and Dragon Programs, Julianna Scheiman, told reporters the company followed "the appropriate rules and regulations" for disposal, but natural forces had other plans.

The impact will excavate a crater 65 to 100 feet wide and about 16 feet deep—the equivalent of 2.8 tons of TNT. It will be too dim to see with the naked eye. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will photograph the crater in the coming weeks.

Here is where the spin diverges. The New York Times opened its report with this: "Humanity is once again littering our nearest celestial neighbor." Littering. The word does real work—framing an uncontrolled orbital decay as a moral failing by Elon Musk specifically, while ignoring that man-made objects have hit the moon repeatedly since the Soviet Union did it intentionally in 1959. U.S. Apollo missions left hardware on the surface. A Japanese probe hit in 1993. A European satellite collided in 2006. And in 2009, NASA deliberately crashed a rocket upper stage into a shadowed crater at the lunar south pole to search for water ice—which it found. That was "science." This is "littering."

ABC News and CBS News both covered the actual science. Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of a study on the impact, told ABC the event offers a unique calibration opportunity: researchers know the mass and speed of this object, unlike natural meteoroids, so they can test their impact-modeling techniques against real data. The plume of ejected material could reveal the composition of that part of the lunar surface. With NASA planning to return astronauts as early as 2028, Fernando said, understanding impact risks to people and equipment is critical.

CBS noted that Boston University planetary scientist Carl Schmidt hopes to analyze the data to determine how much water ice is hidden below the surface—the same logic that justified NASA's intentional 2009 crash.

The moon has been hit by meteoroids for four billion years. One more crater—this one with known parameters that let scientists sharpen their instruments—is not a crisis. It is the cost of doing business in space. And SpaceX is the only company actually advancing human spaceflight at scale right now. The same press that shrugs at government rocket failures wants you outraged that a booster, subject to forces beyond anyone's control after proper disposal procedures, ended up where boosters have ended up since the Space Age began.

The question isn't whether SpaceX left trash on the moon. The question is why the press reaches for that frame the moment Elon Musk's name appears in a story.