The recent, dramatic collision of a spent SpaceX rocket booster with the far side of the Moon was greeted by many in the mainstream scientific community with a sense of opportunistic excitement. Promoted as an unintentional scientific boon, the crash was framed as a rare, free experiment that would allow researchers to study the mechanics of high-speed kinetic impacts and analyze the subsurface composition of the lunar crust. Yet, beneath this thin veneer of scientific curiosity lies a deeply unsettling reality that we have been quietly accepting since the dawn of the space age in the late 1950s. Every time we send a piece of machinery into the cosmos, we carry with us a lingering, unchecked habit of leaving our trash behind, treating the celestial bodies that have guided humanity for millennia as mere repositories for our technological detritus. Whether it is a flag, a defunct lunar lander, or a discarded rocket booster slamming into the quiet dust of the Moon at thousands of miles per hour, we are witnessing the extension of a troubling human pathology. We have long looked up at the night sky with a sense of wonder, romance, and spiritual connection; the Moon is a universal anchor of human culture, keeping our time, pulling our tides, and lighting our darkest nights. To reduce this shared celestial companion to a target for stray corporate garbage is not a triumph of human ingenuity, but rather a symptom of a profound disconnect. It reveals a modern worldview that values immediate technological utility over long-term preservation, blinding us to the ethical dimensions of how we interact with environments beyond our own atmospheric borders. This incident should not be celebrated as a lucky accident of data collection; rather, it must serve as an urgent wake-up call to examine the deeper, more insidious narratives driving our current approach to the cosmos.
To truly understand why we so easily dismiss the littering of the Moon, we must critically examine the historical and linguistic frameworks that shape our modern vocabulary of space exploration. The language we use to describe our journey into the stars—terms like “pioneering,” “conquering,” “colonizing,” and “the final frontier”—is not neutral; it is directly copy-pasted from the historical lexicon of settler colonialism. On Earth, this logic was driven by the legal doctrine of terra nullius, a Latin term meaning “land belonging to no one.” This philosophical fiction allowed European empires to declare inhabited Indigenous lands as empty, wild, and legally vacant, thereby justifying the violent dispossession, theft, and ecological destruction of those environments. Today, this exact same ideology is being projected outward onto the lunar surface and the wider solar system. Because the Moon lacks liquid water, breathable oxygen, and organic life, it is treated as a supreme wilderness—a barren, silent rock that is open for the taking, free to be exploited, mined, and used as a dumping ground by whoever possesses the capital to get there first. By viewing the Moon through the cold, transactional lens of terra nullius, we detach ourselves from any sense of moral responsibility toward it. We convince ourselves that because there are no human residents to displace, our actions carry no ethical consequences. However, this is a dangerous delusion. The habit of treating a place as “empty” simply because it does not conform to our immediate definitions of life is the very foundation of environmental exploitation. It teaches us to view the universe not as a web of interconnected relationships, but as a collection of resources waiting to be consumed and discarded, replicating the same destructive patterns that have brought our own planet to the brink of ecological collapse.
This colonial mindset has found a dangerous and powerful new vehicle in the rapid privatization of space exploration, which has shifted the cosmic playing field from state-regulated space agencies to ultra-wealthy private tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Where space exploration was once governed, however imperfectly, by international treaties and national oversight, it is increasingly becoming an unregulated playground for the world’s wealthiest individuals. For these corporate elites, outer space represents the ultimate free-market laboratory—a place where terrestrial regulations do not apply, where labor and environmental laws do not exist, and where the rules of engagement are treated as minor obstacles to be bypassed in the name of disruptive innovation. When private corporations operate with little to no democratic accountability, the cosmos ceases to be a shared human heritage and instead becomes an experimental zone for corporate egos and vanity projects. The sky is no longer a canvas of collective human dreams; it is a billboard and a testing ground. These billionaires exploit the romanticism of space travel to justify their unchecked activities, presenting themselves as visionaries securing the future of humanity while simultaneously littering the orbital paths of Earth and the surfaces of our nearest celestial neighbors. This lack of governance means that decisions affecting the entire planet—and the future of our relationship with the solar system—are being made in corporate boardrooms rather than through global consensus. We must confront the reality that allowing private capital to dictate the terms of cosmic exploration is a recipe for a new era of celestial feudalism, where celestial bodies are carved up for private profit without regard for their intrinsic value or the common good.
As an Ojibwe scholar deeply invested in environmental governance, I find it impossible to view the Moon as merely a cold, inanimate lump of rock orbiting our planet. In many Indigenous worldviews, including my own, the Moon is understood not as a dead object to be analyzed and exploited, but as a powerful, vital, and relational presence—a grandmother, a relative, and an active participant in the balance of life on Earth. This perspective of relational ethics recognizes that our responsibilities do not stop at the edge of our atmosphere. Throughout history, Indigenous nations have consistently spoken out against the unethical treatment of the Moon, opposing commercial initiatives like lunar burials, where companies charge wealthy families to deposit human ashes on the lunar surface, and resisting proposals to use the Moon as a disposal site for hazardous nuclear waste. These protests are often patronizingly dismissed by mainstream commentators as “anti-science” or “superstitious.” This is a deeply flawed and colonial narrative. Indigenous peoples do not oppose scientific discovery; rather, we advocate for a science that is guided by respect, reciprocity, and ethical stewardship. Successful collaborations, such as the ongoing partnerships between NASA and the Navajo Nation, demonstrate that rigorous scientific inquiry and deeply rooted relational ethics are not only compatible, but mutually reinforcing. When we integrate Indigenous knowledge systems with modern astrophysics, we cultivate a richer, more holistic understanding of the universe—one that values the preservation of sacred spaces and acknowledges that how we conduct our research is just as important as what we discover. Viewing the cosmos through a relational lens forces us to ask not just what we can extract from a place, but how we can behave as good relatives within it.
The argument that we can learn valuable scientific lessons from crashing man-made space junk into the Moon is a profound fallacy that ignores the clean, elegant lessons that nature already provides. The lunar surface is struck by natural meteorites on a daily basis, offering scientists an abundance of clean, organic impact data without the need to scatter highly toxic, human-made materials across the lunar landscape. There is absolutely nothing that an abandoned, metal-alloy rocket booster can teach us about impact physics that natural celestial phenomena do not already demonstrate more cleanly. By framing these uncontrolled crashes as positive scientific opportunities, we are engaging in a dangerous form of cognitive dissonance, normalizing the pollution of other worlds under the guise of intellectual progress. At a time when our own home planet is besieged by severe environmental crises—ranging from climate change and plastic pollution to catastrophic biodiversity loss—our current behavior in space represents a tragic failure to learn from our past mistakes. Instead of addressing the unsustainable patterns of consumption and waste generation that have devastated Earth, we are simply exporting these exact same behaviors to the Moon and beyond. This is not the advancement of human knowledge; it is the scaling of environmental degradation to a cosmic level. If we cannot manage our waste and respect the boundaries of our own biosphere, we have no ethical right to treat the rest of the solar system as our personal landfill, pretending that the vastness of space absolves us of our duty of care. The environmental crisis is not a localized issue confined to Earth’s surface, but a systemic crisis of relationship that we are actively exporting into the stars.
True progress in our journey toward the stars cannot be measured merely by the height of our rockets, the power of our engines, or the profit margins of private aerospace corporations; it must be measured by the depth of our ethical maturity and our capacity for collective stewardship. As we stand at this pivotal crossroads in human history, we urgently need a dramatic shift in how outer space is governed, moving away from a competitive, corporate-led land grab toward an inclusive, international model of shared responsibility. This means establishing robust, binding legal frameworks that hold both state and corporate actors strictly accountable for the waste they produce and the damage they inflict on celestial environments. Crucially, these conversations about cosmic governance must not be monopolized by wealthy nations and billionaire tech elites; they must meaningfully include the voices of those who have historically been marginalized, including Indigenous communities and the nations of the Global South. By weaving diverse cultural perspectives, ethical frameworks, and ecological wisdom into our international space policies, we can ensure that the Moon and the stars are held in common stewardship for all of humanity, rather than carved up as private property. We must approach the cosmos not with the arrogance of conquerors seeking a new frontier to tame, but with the humility of travelers entering a sacred, shared space. Only by grounding our space exploration in a philosophy of respect, reciprocity, and global accountability can we hope to build a future where our journey into the stars is a source of genuine enlightenment, rather than a tragic extension of our worst terrestrial mistakes.
