Space exploration has become a vanity project for the powerful, Bennett argues

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, having completed its assigned work, was released into orbit in January 2025. It drifted off course, pulled toward the moon by gravity, and crashed into the lunar surface two weeks ago. It will remain there forever—one more piece of debris scattered across a world that has become, in effect, a dumping ground for the powerful.

The crash itself is not unusual. Rockets have been hitting the moon for decades. NASA has intentionally steered rockets into the lunar surface to study the impact. India's lunar lander crashed there in 2019, as did Israel's that same year. China sent a rocket booster into the moon in 2022, Russia in 2023. What makes this moment worth examining is not the crash itself, but what it represents: space exploration has become a theater for the egos of men who have grown bored with Earth.

Elon Musk owns SpaceX. The rocket belongs to him, in the way that power and wealth create ownership. And Musk is one of a particular breed—a man who sees himself as having outgrown this planet. He is not alone in this delusion. The effective proprietors of the rocket debris now scattered across the moon's surface are Trump, Musk, Modi, Netanyahu, Xi, and Putin. Every one of them male. Every one of them ravenous for power. Every one of them convinced that space is another arena in which to compete, to dominate, to leave their mark.

The economics of space colonization are absurd. Mars would require trillions of dollars spent to create what amounts to remote incarceration. The moon would be prison without even the mercy of an exercise yard. Who would go? A few. Who would stay? None. Life there would be so hostile, so isolating, so utterly devoid of the conditions that make existence bearable, that no rational person would choose it. And yet the project continues, not because it serves humanity, but because it serves the vanity of men who have convinced themselves that leaving Earth is the ultimate expression of their importance.

There was a moment, in 1969, when Armstrong descended the ladder onto lunar dust, and the world looked up at the moon and felt something genuine—the wonder of human capability, the sense that we had reached beyond ourselves. That was a stunt, yes, but a stunt that meant something. Sixty years later, the moon has become a landfill. It is littered with the dead engines of the worst of us.

The moon was never meant to be this. For all of human history, it has been woven into our existence. We divided our year into twelve moon cycles. We named the first day of every week after it. We have sung to it, written about it, associated it with dreams and love and sorrow. We have sat beneath it and wondered at its silvery remoteness, the way it cuts through cloud, its startling brightness. We knew it to be a lifeless rock, and yet we treated it as sacred, as part of the human story.

Now it is a repository for toxic trash. The moon, which has watched over human civilization since before we had words to describe it, has become a monument to the competitive greed of a handful of men who mistake their wealth for destiny. Space exploration was supposed to be about reaching for something greater than ourselves. Instead, it has become business as usual in an alien environment—the same ancient vanities, the same hunger for dominance, the same refusal to accept limits. We are tipping our worst characteristics into the infinite, and the moon, that ancient companion to human dreams, is bearing the weight of it.