> <i>a whopping 728 feet across, more than twice the length of an American football field</i><p>For the rest of the world, this is ~222 meters, more than twice the length of a 100 meter track.<p>EDIT: Ninja'd! :-)
Basically, moon bases need to be underground to prevent micrometeoroids from messing them up, and any bigger impact like this is going to wipe out anything we build, even underground.<p>All the more reason Earth is pretty awesome!<p>Fun fact: moon regolith is made of ~45% oxygen, so in a roundabout way digging underground is kind of like having an atmosphere.
Archive: <a href="https://archive.ph/88rlJ" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/88rlJ</a>
As with Mars (and Silo) we need a very deep pit to protect humans from the radiation.
In some more enlightened timeline there's a spirited competition between institutional and amateur astronomers towards predicting these, and some amateur is sitting on a $10M this-person-told-us-so-and-we-bet-against-them prize, which gets bigger every year (no prizes for the institutional side, they get a salary).<p>In that timeline's future we're then competing over who can most reliably prevent them.<p>The winners of such frivolous competitions over protecting the moon get funding for the more serious job of protecting Earth.
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/science/space/what-a-massive-new-crater-means-for-future-moon-bases.html?unlocked_article_code=1.E1E.p7Sx.xUPQ1BuWlWIb&smid=url-share" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/science/space/what-a-mass...</a>
Eh, still have to login.
I don't even get that far but get a blank page except for: "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker." They're doing a pretty good job of minimizing their traffic.
Bypass Paywalls Clean on Quetta works fine.
I can only get you so far...
NASA<p>free to view, you already paid for it<p><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-moon-orbiter-spots-new-once-in-century-moon-crater/" rel="nofollow">https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-moon-orbite...</a>
It means someone will ask 10x price for building the US lunar base.
> previously unseen lunar crater that’s a whopping 728 feet across, more than twice the length of an American football field.<p>For the rest of the world, it's about 222m.<p>> objects the size of monster truck tires<p>FFS, just use metric! Apparently that's about 1.7m.