I will confess to being rather proprietary about the Moon. She has mattered to me since before my memory properly began, for when I finally sat down in my twenties to learn this craft, I discovered her to rule my chart entirely, which felt less like news and more like a diagnosis I’d been carrying around unnamed my whole life.

The story goes how my father carried me out into the dark evenings as an infant, to look up, and that one of my first sentences was “have it moon“, so I was, by every account, programmed early and thoroughly. This does seem to explain, therefore, why my protective instincts went from nought to fully armed this week, when the debris of some godforsaken space project went and crashed straight into the poor Moon; I was, I don’t mind telling you, indignant on her behalf.

The offending object was the spent second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which struck the lunar surface on 5 August 2026, more than eighteen months after anyone, I am sure, had last given it much of a second thought. Launched on 15 January 2025 from Kennedy Space Centre under the rather wonderful project name “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” the Falcon carried two lunar spacecraft toward their separate fates: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, loaded with NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services instruments, and Ispace’s lunar lander Resilience.

Having delivered both projects to their transfer trajectories, Falcon’s upper stage did what upper stages do once nobody needs them anymore: it was cut loose, left to drift in a high-energy orbit between Earth and Moon, forgotten by everyone except, apparently, gravity, which spent the next year and a half quietly working out exactly how to bring it home.
Nobody built this thing to be the story. It existed to do one unglamorous job: to hoist two decidedly more interesting travellers clear of Earth’s grip, and then it was meant to vanish into the background, the way all good stagehands do. Instead it spent eighteen months wandering cislunar space with nowhere in particular to be, until the combined tug of Earth, Moon and Sun finally decided its fate.

The launch chart tells its own rather pointed little story, taking place on the day of Mars, in the hour of the Moon. The figure rises with 2 degrees of Scorpio, a sign, and a ruler, entirely fitting for a rocket, and also nodding vigorously to Mars rulership over falcons as a species; the whole affair is thoroughly, almost comically, over-signified by one planet, one that is not exactly having a good day. Mars sits in fall in Cancer, and retrograde besides, which is roughly the astrological equivalent of setting out on a road trip in a car you already suspect may not make it, and even if it could, there may well be some hidden reason for a detour that takes you miles from your intended destination.

Venus, ruling the seventh house and thus the destination itself, fares rather better; exalted in Pisces, she is, however, applying to an unhappy conjunction with Saturn, which has a way of putting a damper on even the most flattering placement. The Moon, meanwhile, is slow and entirely without dignity in Leo, peregrine, wandering without portfolio through a sign that answers to someone else entirely. Add fixed signs on every angle of the chart, and you have a rocket built, quite literally, for hardship rather than arrival.

And so it proved. Blue Ghost landed successfully on 2nd March, precisely when the Sun, ruler of the tenth, the chart’s captain and commanding officers, conjoined Venus, the destination’s own significator; a tidy piece of celestial bookkeeping. Resilience, however, was not so lucky. Its landing system failed, and it struck the Moon hard on 6th June of the same year, leaving Blue Ghost to complete its mission and rest in peace while its sibling did not. The upper stage itself never had a destination on the books at all; it simply drifted until orbital mechanics wrote one in for it, eighteen months later.

Set the impact chart for SpaceX’s Hawthorne headquarters, and the symmetry gets almost eerie: the Moon rises in Taurus, sitting exactly on the seventh cusp of the original launch chart, the very point marked out as “destination” a year and a half before. The Sun and Jupiter, meanwhile, sit precisely where the Moon herself stood at launch; the chart, in other words, waited eighteen months to keep an appointment nobody remembered making.

Speaking in symbolic terms, the rocket becomes an emblem for every unseen labourer who launches somebody else’s life and then gets quietly filed under “no longer required.” Parents. Carers. Teachers. The friend who did the heavy lifting and then wasn’t invited to the party. Their work rarely gets applauded, largely because it was never designed to be seen, existing only to make someone else’s future possible, and then it’s expected to have the good manners to disappear.

The mission names do rather a lot for me here too. Ghost Riders in the Sky is a fitting title for every presence that keeps travelling with us long after it’s vanished from view; ancestors, old selves, relationships that ended without quite ending, dreams we quietly retired rather than buried. None of it truly leaves. It orbits, and every so often it swings back close enough to remind us it never actually went anywhere. Resilience, for its part, offers a sharper irony: named for the very quality it failed to demonstrate, crashing while its partner coasted gently home, proof that even the thing named for surviving can still come apart on landing, casting aspersions on our questionable capacity to just keep going regardless.

So, in my naturally mythographical mind, the final impact isn’t merely a footnote in orbital mechanics, whatever NASA’s press office might call it. It could be read, really rather precisely, like the moment unresolved grief finally taps you on the shoulder after years of polite silence. Something you assumed had drifted off for good comes back and lands with far more force than you were braced for. The Moon has always stood for memory, for attachment, for home, for whatever part of us keeps the emotional accounts. That an abandoned piece of hardware should eventually find its way back to wound her is, frankly, too good an image for me to leave behind.

And yes, there is a softer reading of this situation too, if you look for it. The rocket didn’t fail; it did precisely what it was built to do, it carried its charges safely out into the trajectories that became their own stories, and then it kept travelling on its own account before finally coming to rest. That final descent wasn’t the mission going wrong. It was the mission, quietly, finishing. Grief so often convinces us that whatever has gone is over, meaningless, filed away simply because it’s dropped out of sight. It rarely is. Some lives, some labours, aren’t measured by where they finally land, but by what they managed to carry safely into the future.

For me, I think this is the root of why news of this ungainly bit of space debris set me thinking, and as the mother of young adults, it is particularly pertinent at this stage in my life: healing is never about leaving the past behind, what has already done its work doesn’t get discarded, it keeps orbiting quietly, patiently, until the moment it’s due to return. Not to wreck us. Just to leave its mark on the map of memory, and remind us that every ending is proof that something worth having once began.

Now, if the engineers could kindly aim their next batch of hardware somewhere other than the precious Moon, I’d take it as a personal favour.