The recent crash of an abandoned booster of a SpaceX rocket has been viewed as an unintentional boon for planetary science. The impact site of the booster will undoubtedly provide scientists with more information about the effects of high-speed impacts on the lunar surface.

At first glance, this is yet another instance of humanity putting a man-made object on the Moon (albeit indirectly)—we have been doing so since the late 1950s. However, there are troubling implications for this latest lunar impact in how we view extraterrestrial environments and interact with them.

The language of space exploration directly parallels the logic used to justify the dispossession and theft of Indigenous lands and environments on Earth: settler colonialism. A cornerstone of this phenomenon is terra nullius—land that is viewed as belonging to no one, and therefore open for the taking. Extraterrestrial space and the Moon are similarly viewed as an open and unclaimed "final frontier." In practice, the Moon is treated like a vast wilderness, where state and corporate actors abandon the detritus of their engagement, whether a flag, a sensor, or a discarded rocket booster.

As space exploration shifts away from state agencies to private billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, outer space is becoming a playground for the ultra-wealthy. Unbound by the strict governance that constrains state actors, private companies treat the cosmos as an experimental zone where rules are merely suggestions to be disregarded. The lack of humans or other living organisms on the Moon does not relieve us of the responsibility to act ethically in space.

Speaking as an Ojibwe scholar of environmental governance, I cannot view the Moon as just an empty rock, but rather as a powerful relational presence—a viewpoint shared by many Indigenous communities worldwide. In fact, Indigenous nations have frequently pushed back against unethical engagements in outer space, including commercial lunar burials and the use of the Moon as a potential dumping ground for hazardous waste.

The central argument through all these expressions of opposition is that we cannot view the Moon or space simply as a blank canvas for humanity to use at our whims—it needs to be treated like a relative.

Dismissing Indigenous opposition as "anti-science" is a false narrative. Collaborations like those between NASA and the Navajo Nation, which include conservation, Indigenous knowledge and science, demonstrate that scientific inquiry and relational ethics are deeply compatible. The issue is not space exploration itself, but stewardship. There is nothing we can learn from an abandoned rocket booster slamming into the Moon that nature does not already teach us cleaner—natural meteorites hit the lunar surface daily without adding man-made space junk.

In an era where we are besieged by environmental crises due to human impacts on Earth, our engagement with space demands reflection. Exporting our environmental missteps to the Moon is not advancing human knowledge; it is scaling environmental degradation to a whole new realm. Outer space exploration demands international accountability and ethical stewardship. We cannot allow corporate elites to set the terms of cosmic governance. True progress requires the meaningful inclusion of marginalized voices, including Indigenous communities and the Global South, ensuring space is held in common stewardship for all.

Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles is an incoming Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at Bemidji State University (Bemidji, Minnesota). A citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, their work focuses on Indigenous lenses of human-environment interactions, political ecology, Indigenous geographies of outer space, and community-engaged scholarship. They have authored several pieces on colonialism and space, including a 2020 essay in Society+Space, and a chapter in the recent Routledge Handbook of Outer Space Studies.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.