The first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, weighing 4000 kilograms, recently collided with the moon’s surface, creating an enormous cloud of lunar dust that could be seen from Earth. The rocket joined about 3,000 other man-made objects scattered across the moon's surface. Some experts believe it is time to start dealing with the lunar environment better rather than turning it into a landfill.

The quality of space waste on the Moon
 

According to “space” website, since the beginning of the Space Age, about 200 tons of Earth materials have been left on the moon’s surface, either intentionally or by accident. Some of these materials are prominent in history books such as the landing modules from all six Apollo missions, the Soviet Lunokhod vehicles from the 1970s, and China's Yutu 1 and 2 robots from the 2010s, which remain in their original locations after being left there or running out of power.

But there is also a lot of material on the moon’s surface that shouldn't be there. “Many rocket stages and other objects left in orbit between Earth and the Moon since the first lunar missions in the 1960s may have ended up on the moon's surface,” says astronomer and space historian Jonathan McDowell. For example, four years before the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket crashed near Einstein crater, part of a Chinese Long March 3C rocket hit the far side of the Moon. Experts believe that such accidents could become more common in the coming years as lunar exploration intensifies.

Lack of clear rules for lunar exploration

"We are in a transition phase," says McDowell. “Since the era when only the United States and the Soviet Union explored the Moon, we have seen other countries land on the moon’s surface and commercial missions begin over the past decade. But governance has not kept pace with this development. We lack an international set of agreements about how to operate near the moon, and how to coordinate activities there. And we will need them badly, not only as more activity takes place on the lunar surface, but also because the number of different actors is increasing dramatically."

Marianna Valdivia Levort, a policy officer at the Royal Astronomical Society in the UK, explained that human activities on the Moon are subject to the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty. Article IX of this treaty obliges states “to pursue exploration of outer space for peaceful purposes and to avoid harmful contamination”, but she noted that the definition of such pollution is not entirely clear.

The moon is large, with a surface area of about 38 million square kilometers, comparable to the size of Asia, Earth’s largest continent, which has an area of 44 million square kilometers. However, the Moon's low gravity, about 17% of Earth's, means that impact dust travels long distances and takes a long time to settle, as McDonald explained.

"It is not just a local phenomenon," she added. "This would be equivalent to an event on the scale of a continent. In the future, when permanent human bases are established and scientific experiments are conducted on the Moon's surface, we do not want rocket stages regularly impacting the moon, creating dense clouds of dust that could contaminate instruments or affect gravitational wave detectors."