6 ms·
Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5
- tempodox 2mo ago> though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of. My thoughts exactly.
- ilamont 2mo agoI love this page. Text, photos, links. Straight up HTML 4, maybe even using a template in a text editor and FTPed to go live. I didn't see any inline or referenced CSS. No scripts. No ads. No social junk. The home page even has a <table> just like it's 1994. What are the drawbacks to reverting to this type web publishing? That's how I used to do things before publishing tools and CMS and platforms took over, but I know the security landscape has changed quite a bit, and such pages are always in the deep long tail of Google results (and therefore practically invisible to AI summaries, which often surface complete junk as sources).
- sheept 2mo agoThe main drawback with the page's unstyled design is that the page is not mobile friendly. Publishing web pages by manually editing HTML files is still very common today; any GitHub Pages blog does this.
- burkaman 2mo agoIt's obviously not designed for mobile but I wouldn't call it unfriendly, it's still fast and pretty easy to read. It also works perfectly with Firefox reader mode.
- Krssst 2mo agoFirefox's reader mode works really well on the article, I wonder why it's not the default for unstyled pages.
- xnx 2mo ago<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> is the only thing keeping this page from being mobile friendly. Having that not be the browser default was a good idea in 2008, but not now.
- account42 2mo agoIt wasn't a good idea even in 2008.
- zahlman 2mo agoI don't have a smartphone to test on. What happens without this?
- oakesm9 2mo agoYou essentially see the desktop version zoomed out by default with tiny text. You need to zoom in, but the line length is still desktop sized so you need to scroll left and right as well as up and down to read it.
- account42 2mo agoAnd mobile browsers keep this defective by design default even they now all have an actual desktop mode that does pretty much the same thing but more consistently.
- xnx 2mo agoIf you want to see it for yourself: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/device-mode https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/device-mode
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- lenkite 2mo agoNever understood why we need to add this ridiculous tag for mobile. CSS/HTML are responsive by default.
- barbazoo 2mo agoThat's a feature for me, not a bug. Not everything has to be everything-friendly all the time, especially if it makes it easier to consume content or stuff. Edit: I'm forgetting about certain accessibility issues, although I'm not sure this plain page isn't a good fit for accessibility tools.
- recursive 2mo agoThis sounds like a critique of mobile browsers. Make friendliness the default!
- childofhedgehog 2mo agoWhat part of this is actually not mobile friendly? I’d argue this is laid out pretty well compared to some websites that are “mobile friendly” but load poorly or make it impossible to scroll.
- recursive 2mo agoIf you need to scroll the viewport left and right to read a line of text, that seems kind of unfriendly.
- Rebelgecko 2mo agoOn my screen it fit perfectly after double tapping
- pynappo 2mo agoI mean it fits, but i don't find the text size particularly usable for mobile On vivaldi mobile on an android phone (with an approximately 6x3" display), i see this as the first line: > On 2026 August 5, within a few minutes of 06:35 UTC, an upper stage (section) of a rocket used for a lunar mission will hit the And for me, reading a 124 character wide line on a 3" wide screen (75mmish) is not particularly comfortable.
- asdff 2mo agoWhen oriented horizontally, the text becomes larger than a lot of the ios system text size
- jonathanlydall 2mo agoI used reading mode on Safari and it was perfect for reading.
- jdironman 2mo agoIn this pages case, I disagree. I feel like when pages try to force their 'aspect ratio / styling' to fit the view port I have to fight more with it. at least as it stands I can zoom as needed on this page, I can appreciate the web devs 'vision' as in how it probably appeared on their machine. I honestly hate mobile sites unless they are done just super super well which is harder than expected. https://rockauto.com https://rockauto.com is one such site that I think works really well on mobile.
- somat 2mo agoA page like this, with minimal styling, the whole point is the author does not care, the author expects the user's agent to style the document optimally for it's dimensions., the optimal in responsive design. this was the original vision for the web, the agent supplies most of the style. Except it does not, for some weird reason unstyled pages like this which should look great on mobile look like ass. Why are mobile browsers defaults so wrong? This hits hard because this is how I build my pages (you can probably tell I am not a front end designer) I just want to put well structured content out and let the users agent display it in the manner that suits the user best. And it mostly works, it will not win any awards but it looks fine. Until someone asks why it looks like the dog's breakfast on mobile.
- perilunar 2mo agoAs mentioned above, adding a viewport meta tag will make most unstyled pages look much better on mobile. <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> > Why are mobile browsers defaults so wrong? History. When mobile browsers first appeared they had to default to a desktop page width to avoid breaking exisiting content, much of which was either built in layout tables or used CSS that assumed a wider window. The viewport meta tag was introduced (by Apple in Mobile Safari when the iPhone first came out, IIRC) so developers could override that behaviour. I think the defaults made a lot of sense at the time, and Apple made the right choice.
- RandallBrown 2mo agoI kinda think it's more mobile friendly than desktop friendly (although it isn't great on either.) It's sorta hard to read text that spans the whole screen and at least on mobile, that's not nearly as wide.
- account42 2mo agoYou don't have to make your browser as wide on your screen on desktop either.
- bartread 2mo ago> not mobile friendly. It’s not what I’d call mobile unfriendly either. I had to zoom in slightly but then it’s perfectly readable in landscape. Some very basic inline responsive CSS would make it work great in portrait too. But the thing is, with no ads, complex layout, or other bullshit, it’s perfectly usable on mobile as is. I’d certainly take this over any website from any major media outlet, other than those that are publicly funded like the BBC (and, even then, only in the UK because they show ads everywhere else).
- account42 2mo agoYou don't need any responsive CSS as HTML is responsive by default. It's just mobile browsers that have decided they know better and you need to add a meta tag to tell them to actually follow the standard.
- ErroneousBosh 2mo ago> The main drawback with the page's unstyled design is that the page is not mobile friendly. Then fix mobile browsers to display it correctly.
- phoghed 2mo agoThey’re already fixed, just add the meta tag if you give the slightest semblance of a shit. Otherwise don’t and people may be less inclined to engage with your content on their phone.
- ErroneousBosh 2mo agoAdd what in a meta tag? Why should web developers change their content to work on defective browsers?
- account42 2mo agoExactly, all the meta tag does is tell mobile browsers to follow the standard as written before they existed. They should just do that by default.
- phoghed 2mo agoBecause it wouldn’t work for every website and the web almost never breaks backward compatibility.
- ErroneousBosh 2mo agoSo if I have a block of totally unstyled HTML, why wouldn't a phone browser just display it in the most sensible way possible?
- account42 2mo agoIt would work a lot better than what mobile browsers are doing now. The only websites that can be argued to be helped by that were those with fixed table layouts - but those are still pretty unusable even with the standards-noncompliant hack. And websites that were mobile-compatible before like plain HTML sites like the TFA are needlessly broken.
- gavinsyancey 2mo agoI read it on a mobile device and found it perfectly legible. I like small text though.
- dredmorbius 2mo agoWith Firefox Reader Mode (also available on a few other browsers) it's perfect. Though that rather invites the question of why browser defaults are so poor.
- asdff 2mo agoThe page is great on my phone. Loads instantly unlike any other mobile website in existence, seemingly.
- barbazoo 2mo agoAnd it's so fast even with pictures. I miss the old internet.
- deadbabe 2mo agoYou could easily make a browser extension that passes each page through an AI agent that will rewrite the page in the given style. It’s fun.
- zahlman 2mo agoWe get submissions like this fairly commonly (we also get ones that are "modern" but use hand-crafted CSS, use only un-minified first-party-written JS for progressive enhancement, etc.). But a large fraction of them are about the style as well as exhibiting it. The main drawback seems to be that larger communities than HN will, at best, not care.
- ColdStream 2mo agoIt highlighted something that I hadn't realised had been impacting me. The latency of the modern web. There are a lot of hyperlinks on there and clicking around on various related articles was near instantaneous. It actually made navigation very useful and not feel like a burden. I will take that over any visual flair any day.
- CommenterPerson 2mo agoI wish the entire web was in this format. Really. May need a bit of work to navigate around but very fast, no BS, no tracking.
- accrual 2mo agoThe author's email obfuscation holds up well against small local models too, just for kicks neither Qwen-9B, Gemma-12B, nor GPT-OSS-20B could read it, giving results like "poc.otulptcejorp@otulm".
- cyanregiment 2mo agoI miss FTP man… let’s go back
- perilunar 2mo agoNothing stopping you — it's still there and still works. I use it for one of my sites.
- cyanregiment 2mo agoYeah but when I wear my FileZilla shirt at concerts I never get the girl
- toast0 2mo ago> What are the drawbacks to reverting to this type web publishing? It's nearly impossible to get overlapping text without css...
- fishfasell 2mo agoGotta love the instantaneous load
- sixtyj 2mo ago> Over 600 Falcon 9 rockets have been launched. Most of the upper stages are either in orbits close to the earth or have already re-entered the earth's atmosphere. A few are orbiting the sun. The object that will be hitting the moon has been orbiting the earth for a little over a year.
- clort 2mo agosomething they didn't mention, what is in this upper stage? I'm presuming a rocket motor and some fuel is that right..? They do a calculation of energy release on impact, but I'm wondering if there is any fuel left and whether that would affect their equation?
- tekla 2mo agoI can't really think of much besides maybe some batteries. The fuel and oxidizer are supposed to be dumped shortly after payload deployment to prevent any issues with blowing up. Even if it wasn't dumped, its been a year, so it would have boiled off.
- ggreer 2mo agoLike most upper stages, Falcon 9 makes itself inert after a mission by venting any remaining propellant. Otherwise there's a risk that propellant could boil off, increasing pressure until the tank explodes, creating a debris cloud. Since pretty much any collision in space is catastrophic, it's easier to track and avoid one large piece of debris rather than a bunch of small ones.
- norenh 2mo agoWelp, my initial thought based on the link was that this was part of Project Pluto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto https://web.archive.org/web/20200329022906/http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200329022906/http://www.merkle... It is not... This is a Falcon-9 rocket stage, not a part from the Flying Crowbar or any similar nightmare-device.
- dopamean 2mo agoAfter so much time hearing about how SpaceX dumps rocket debris all over Boca Chica it's kind of amusing that they're also leaving trash on the moon. It would be cool if we sent people back to the moon one day and they took photos next to junk like this. Or whatever is left of it.
- whatsupdog 2mo agoThis "trash" could provide a lot of valuable metal and maybe other stuff, for future moon missions. I wouldn't really call it trash.
- AngryData 2mo agoThats what I say about the broken down car in my front yard, but it is still frowned upon.
- 47635274172635 2mo ago[dead]
- tekla 2mo agoYou realize we've been smashing shit into the moon since Apollo right? Also you know the literal trash bags of trash and poop that Apollo dumped overboard. This smashing into the the moon will leave a random crater, and last time I checked, lots of craters on the moon.
- lastofthemojito 2mo agoI believe it's actually unresolved whether NASA left poop on the moon or not: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/37952/did-apollo-leave-poop-on-the-moon https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/37952/did-apollo-l...
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoThe Soviet Union was quite busy with their Luna program which made lunar impacts commonplace, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15 Luna 15 was not only in lunar orbit at the same time as Apollo 11, but also sent to crash into Mare Crisium while USA astronauts were still on the surface at Tranquility Base.
- ck2 2mo agosomeone send them a littering bill sadly one day hundreds of years from now parts of the moon will look like all the garbage left on Everest (and maybe even the dead frozen bodies too, moon dust is sticky and very sharp apparently)
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoThat's the neat thing. Dumping on the moon or anywhere (other than Earth) isn't possible, as the litter is infinitely more valuable than the existing dust and rock. It's as if someone was dumping gold bricks into your yard. You really wouldn't mind at all, and would ask for more. The only exception would be radioactive waste, as that is less valuable than the surrounding dust and rock.
- estearum 2mo agoWhat logic tree arrives at this conclusion and doesn't arrive at the same conclusion for dumping in, idk, Arches National Park?
- ggreer 2mo agoThe moon is a lifeless rock with nobody on it. That seems like a better place for garbage to go than the earth. And since it's going to impact the moon at 2.43km/sec, I don't think there will be much visible stuff remaining, just a crater and some bits of aluminum. Also what's the alternative? Moon missions don't have enough extra propellant to go back to earth and deorbit. They might have enough to move to a relatively stable orbit, but then it's just long-lived orbital debris.
- estearum 2mo agoSame rationale for dumping chemicals in the river. It's a river! It all just flows away! There's so much water, who could even notice?
- whatsupdog 2mo agoNot really, rivers flow into oceans where there is life that is impacted by the chemicals, not to mention the life in the river itself. So its not the same rationale. Moon IS a lifeless rock. I agree with the parent, if there was an option between trashing the earth and moon, I would pick moon in a heartbeat.
- glimshe 2mo agoSoon we'll need to call Roger Wilco to take care of all this junk.
- joering2 2mo ago[flagged]
- anonshadow 2mo agoSpace 1999
- TacticalCoder 2mo agoWhat's really impressive is that, according to the picture with labels, it's going to crash near Mos Eisley. EDIT: sorry, Moseley ; )
- bmitc 2mo ago> Generally speaking, such objects are very poorly tracked. Why is there not any regulations about this stuff? So we can't throw a napkin out the window (not that I condone littering), but SpaceX can just literally throw stuff into space that either re-enters Earth (adds to air and environmental issues), swings around in space untracked, or hits the Moon without any reprecussions? Why isn't it on SpaceX to track the trash they're throwing up?
- inemesitaffia 2mo agoIt's NASA's and the FCC's responsibility and this is allowed.
- polishdude20 2mo agoIs there a discord I can join to follow along live?