The moon has a brand new crater as of Wednesday, thanks to a rogue SpaceX rocket that crashed into Earth’s nearest neighbor at 5,400 miles an hour. Originally part of a 2025 mission to launch a pair of lunar landers for U.S. and Japanese companies, the rocket was supposed to fall back to Earth. Instead, it strayed off course and eventually reached its final resting place on the moon’s surface.
According to the Guardian, astronomers were unable to confirm the impact, “possibly because the impact site was close to the visible edges of the moon.” A day later, a Korean lunar orbiter captured images of the impact, but it will still take time to confirm the size of the crater, which is expected to be about 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, for the record. In March 2022, a rocket slammed into the moon, creating a double crater about 95 feet wide. That object was later identified as part of China’s Long March 3C rocket, which propelled the Chang’e 5-T1 mission around the moon in 2014. In fact, there’s been trash on the moon ever since humans first landed there, which some scientists cite as evidence of the Anthropocene, a new geological era defined by how badly humans have messed up the planet and its nearby neighbors.
NEWS 🚨: A Korean lunar orbiter has photographed the crash site of a SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage on the Moon pic.twitter.com/chI8hpWdsv
Indeed, it’s difficult to estimate how space junk is currently orbiting our planet. By one count, there are more than 17,000 metric tons of objects in Earth orbit, including nearly 19,000 satellites. Every time we shoot more stuff up into space, we risk it hitting something else, as in a giant game of billiards. That threatens to create a cataclysmic chain reaction, in which every collision creates more space debris and also risks damaging satellites and space stations we’d like to keep operational. This might make future space launches unsafe (such as the planned Artemis IV moon landing mission) and could render GPS devices completely useless. If you think Google Maps is glitchy now, just wait.
This hypothetical scenario is called Kessler Syndrome, but I propose renaming it Tesla Syndrome, given that Elon Musk’s Starlink has nearly 11,000 satellites in orbit, with eventual plans to launch as many as 42,000. Musk’s car is still floating out there somewhere, too. The statistical probability of a company owned by the world’s richest man making our space trash problem even worse is high, so we’d better keep crossing our fingers for more near misses — and, just maybe, a future in which humans behave less like slobs.
LONDON — Andy Burnham entered Downing Street with a promise to give hard-pressed voters “breathing space” on the cost of living. Now he must show he can deliver.
At the top of his list is finding a way to reduce stubbornly high energy bills — even as the Iran-U.S. war forces up prices and ministers are under pressure to cut their own departmental budgets. The new prime minister knows any intervention must make a real impact for voters if he is to turn Labour’s fortunes around.
“You need to make an emotional connection with people,” said one senior government official, granted anonymity to talk candidly about Whitehall thinking.
Britain’s new prime minister has already made one bid to show voters he is serious about tackling the problem: Removing VAT from household electricity bills, something he announced on his first day in No. 10.
The move will knock less than £4 off the average monthly bill, ends after one year, and comes with a price tag of £850 million. Downing Street said it will be paid for through so-far unspecified Whitehall savings.
But Burnham and his new Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, promised that the intervention is just a start. Cutting VAT is a “down payment” ahead of the winter, Fahnbulleh said.
Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh arrives at 10 Downing Street for Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first cabinet meeting, on July 21, 2026 in London, England. | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
That means ministers have just weeks before Burnham’s first budget this fall to figure out what, if anything, can really ease the burden — and how to pay for it.
Salami slicing
“The fiscal space is going to be a challenge, and that is the case for any government,” said Sam Alvis, associate director for environment, energy security, and nature at the Labour-aligned Institute for Public Policy Research think tank.
That’s because any intervention to bring down energy bills will have to be funded from already under-pressure Whitehall departments.
“This government is going to have a look at the budget. Whether it chooses to do some priorities differently — that is an open question,” Alvis said.
One option for Burnham is to slice more charges from electricity bills, as he did with VAT. But any savings could be quickly wiped out if, as expected, the Middle East crisis pushes up wholesale gas prices.
Forecasters at Cornwall Insight predict that average annual household bills will rise by two percent this fall, even after the VAT intervention.
That leaves Burnham facing the same problems as the man he replaced, Keir Starmer.
Starmer cut £150 off yearly bills last November by shifting some so-called green levies, used to fund a clean energy scheme, onto general taxation. By the summer, that cut had been swallowed up by higher prices driven by the Strait of Hormuz crisis.
Nonetheless, Alvis said, this approach remains Burnham’s most realistic option.
“We are now in a bit of a scenario of salami slicing, where you’re aggregating lots and lots of smaller bits,” he said. “There’s no one big thing that you can do that’s going to take over £100 off bills. So, it’s about accumulating all those things that you think you could possibly do in one go, so it becomes sizable and noticeable.”
Decisions, decisions
One of those options, proposed by the think tank Nesta and reportedly being considered by Burnham, involves shifting further green levies from electricity bills onto tax.
It identified another £42 of savings from a yearly bill, costing the Treasury £1.7 billion per year for a decade.
Every small cut helps consumers, insists Andrew Sissons, Nesta’s director of sustainable futures. The think tank has also proposed knocking £22 a year off bills by shifting the standing charge on gas — currently a fixed daily fee — onto the unit rate, which changes depending on how much energy a home uses. That would take a year to implement and would not cost the government a penny, Nesta says.
But such moves must be accompanied by larger interventions if voters are to feel the benefit, he added.
“The amount you’d need to cut people’s energy bills … for it to feel like a real difference is quite substantial,” he said. The government, he argued, should aim for a “big package.”
If the government aims for larger changes, they would come with even greater costs.
Nesta has suggested a one-off move to wipe out electricity debt, removing some bailout costs currently funded through bills, taking total annual bill savings to £130. But the Treasury would have to find £2.7 billion to fund that.
“[We] shouldn’t ignore the fact that there are fiscal trade-offs. But if the government wants to prioritize energy bills, then this is the kind of step it needs to take,” Sissons added, pointing to their proposed levy change alongside the VAT cut.
Things take time
Net-zero policies will, ministers hope, bring down bills for good. But large-scale changes take years to implement.
“Realistically, the only way to deeply, deeply help people is to get them solar panels, is to get them an EV [electric vehicle], potentially heat pumps in some houses as well,” said Alvis.
This is another reason to opt for “salami slicing”, he said: To “alter the balance of electricity and gas prices, so that those clean technologies stack up and save people even more money.”
Alex Bevan, a research fellow at the Future Governance Forum, agreed that big savings attached to the shift to green energy were still a way off.
“There aren’t quick workarounds on whichever form of energy you choose to generate and deploy,” he said. But government must nonetheless “lock in the benefits [of clean energy],” he argued.
The same official quoted above stressed that no decision had yet been made on how the government would intervene on bills. Asked whether the government favored a series of small policies or one big intervention, they said: “It doesn’t have to be binary. … It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “The energy secretary’s focus is bringing bills down for good. We will tackle the cost of living to make life’s essentials affordable again and bring back hope.”
For now, Alvis insisted, Burnham has one thing going for him: He can operate in the knowledge voters accept international issues are pushing up costs.
“The political point I would make is: By doing your best effort, you give yourself the space to have a conversation with the public,” he said.
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