An American-built SpaceX rocket stage slammed into the Moon at 8,700 kilometers per hour this week, leaving an 18-meter crater — and the establishment press is calling it vandalism instead of progress.

The spent upper stage of a Falcon 9, launched in January of last year carrying two lunar landers, was discarded after delivering its payload and eventually collided with the lunar surface. NASA scientists noted that meteoroids with the same energy hit the Moon roughly every six days. "The lunar surface is constantly absorbing impacts with the same force," they said, according to Europe Says. In other words: the Moon is fine.

But Europe Says framed the impact as "a parable for the move-fast-and-break-things leadership style" of Elon Musk, warning about "reckless, buccaneering spirit" and "a trail of destruction here on Earth." The outlet buried NASA's own reassurance that this is routine and instead pivoted to a laundry list of grievances — workplace injuries, DOGE budget cuts, and Musk's AI ventures — dressed up as a story about a crater.

Here's what actually happened: a private American company launched a rocket, delivered two lunar landers to orbit, and the discarded upper stage — standard practice in spaceflight — eventually hit the Moon. NASA, the agency that once put men on the Moon and now contracts with SpaceX to get Americans back there, shrugged.

Meanwhile, the documentary apparatus is gearing up for its own assault. Alex Gibney, the filmmaker behind profiles of Enron, Elizabeth Holmes, and Julian Assange, is releasing a 232-minute film titled "MUSK," set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival and hit US theaters October 16, Business Insider reported. Musk dismissed it. "It's a hit piece," he wrote on X. "Gibney is incapable of anything else." He also mocked the runtime: "4 hours!!" Gibney shot back when the project was announced in 2023: "How would you know."

The exchange captures the dynamic: an establishment filmmaker who built his career profiling fraudsters and villains now training his lens on the man who revolutionized American spaceflight, electric vehicles, and satellite internet.

Europe Says did surface legitimate data. Reuters documented 600 serious workplace injuries at SpaceX over roughly a decade, including amputations, head injuries, and one death. Health and safety officials found serious violations in the fatality case. Those are real concerns. A serious press would cover them as workplace safety stories — not fold them into a melodrama about a crater on the Moon.

Starship, SpaceX's next-generation rocket, has also had test failures — prototypes bursting into flames more than a dozen times, with shrapnel landing in Mexico. Musk once promised Starship would have people on Mars by 2025. That timeline slipped, as ambitious timelines do.

But the story the press doesn't want to tell is simple: a private American company is launching rockets, delivering payloads to lunar orbit, and pushing toward Mars while the federal government can't build a functional website. The crater on the Moon will likely remain for millions of years. Whether the press can bring itself to see American achievement when it's staring them in the face — that's the open question.