Detonation Moon

That's not a moon, that was a moon.

General: Mr. President, are you suggesting we blow up the Moon?
The President: ...Would you miss it?

— Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

It's bad enough when some bad guy tries to put his John Hancock on the Moon; things get really serious when it's destroyed. This happens in many continuities in many shows many times. Think of an Earth-Shattering Kaboom, only on the Moon.

A sister trope to Deface of the Moon. Compare with Grasp the Sun for a symbolic use of celestial bodies. Expect there to be No Endor Holocaust (unless rabbits live there). If the destruction of the moon does result in serious damage to Earth or nearby planets it may overlap with Colony Drop, especially if done on purpose. Complete destruction is optional: Sometimes it can turn the moon into a Shattered World instead, or make it crescent-shaped.

Something that is only occasionally referenced is that a satellite body does affect the surface of the parent object. Destroying or otherwise removing the Moon from its orbit would cause serious trouble even without debris impacts: no tides would massively disrupt coastal ecosystems, while the loss of the constant effect of water being pulled toward the equator would lead to flooding of temperate coasts, tropical reefs and lagoons left high and dry, and insufficient depth in ports near the equator. Further, moonlight is important to the life cycles of various nocturnal and crepuscular animals, and actually has a nontrivial effect on the thermal equilibrium, such that the loss of moonlight would make Earth slightly colder (though that might actually help by offsetting climate change).

The title is punning on the 1950 SF classic Destination Moon.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A 7-Up commercial had the spokesman attempt to project the 7-Up logo onto the moon with a laser. Unfortunately, the laser was a little too powerful, and... well, boom.
  Orlando Jones: OK! Who has been messing with my laser?!

Anime & Manga

• In the manga of AKIRA, Tetsuo teleports to the moon and blasts a huge hole in it, then shapes the resulting debris into a ring around the moon. The damage alters the tides on Earth.
• The Moon in Assassination Classroom is always a crescent, with the overly long horns nearly touching each other. It's as if someone's taken out a large chunk of it because it is; Koro-sensei blew up 70% of the moon in the beginning, making it a permanent crescent. Later, it's revealed that he didn't actually blow up the moon (it was a lab rat experiment gone wrong), but he decided to take the blame and appropriate it for himself anyway to hide the truth behind his origins. In the epilogue, the crescent Moon collapses due to gravity and becomes closer to Earth, eventually reforming into its regular size and shape prior to the explosion.
• Aldnoah.Zero had this happen to the Earth in the middle of a war between Earth and Mars. A gate on the Moon that allowed travel to Mars (sparking a colonization effort that later declared independence with then led to war) exploded, destroying half the moon and sending large numbers of shards raining down on Earth, killing millions and drastically altering the landscape, as well as leaving a ring of asteroids in Earth's orbit. This event is known in the show as Heaven's Fall.
• In the background of Cowboy Bebop, the moon was massively damaged◊ by a gate research accident occurred 75 years before the series started, killing the bulk of humanity and driving most of the rest to colonize the Solar System. Earth itself is largely a wasteland now: The initial shockwave devastated the portion of Earth facing the moon, and debris continues to rain down on the damaged landscape. Meteor showers are treated like a weather event by the survivors who live in underground cities. The surface can't even be mapped due to the constant creation of new impact craters.
• DEVILMAN crybaby sees the moon sliced in half during the final battle. After everything's settled, the halves are made into individual moons by God.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Master Roshi blows up the moon in Dragon Ball to stop Great Ape Goku's rampage since the Great Ape form is powered by the moon. He gets yelled at afterwards, but Kami restores it some years later on the condition that Goku has his tail (which causes him to transform into a Great Ape when he looks at the full moon) removed.
  • Likewise, Piccolo destroys the moon in Dragon Ball Z to stop Gohan rampaging as a Great Ape. However, it's shown to have been restored once more in Dragon Ball Super.
    • Dragon Ball Z Abridged parodies Piccolo's moon destruction via a news report detailing an estimated death toll of over 100 million due to the lack of moon to regulate the tides, not to mention all waterbenders losing their power and Sailor Moon being in horrible agony.
• This happens sometimes in Doctor Slump, it being a gag manga with no realism at all. Usually it's Arale who destroys the Moon with her Super-Strength, by chucking boulders at it. Afterwards we see the Moon all patched up, like a broken vase.
• In Fairy Tail, a village asks the heroes to destroy the moon, which has turned purple and started turning the villagers into demons at night. Subverted, as they only had to remove the aftermath of a ritual that took place on the island, which made the moon look purple and messed with the memories of the villagers, who really were demons to begin with.
• Happens in Gundam Build Fighters Try when Sekai uses an attack so powerful that it straight up splits the moon in half... even if he used it on Earth. Of course, the moon in this case is a virtual moon generated by the system used for Gunpla battles, it still serves to highlight Sekai's potential as a Gunpla fighter.
• In the final episodes of Jewelpet Sunshine, one of Jewel Land's two moons is partially destroyed by Jewelina under the Dark Magic's influence.
• Medaka Box: Medaka does this to prevent the moon from crashing into the Earth, by herself. How she manages to do it is never explained. Unless "she's Medaka" is considered sufficient explanation. She promises to fix it and, sure enough, the epilogue chapters reveal that as an adult, she's working on a project to create an artificial moon to take its place.
• In The Last: Naruto the Movie, the final battle takes place on the surface of the moon, which is falling slowly towards Earth (and most of the film took place inside it, as it's a Hollow World). During the battle, Naruto's opponent Toneri unleashes the power of his Tenseigan, cutting the moon in half. It's mostly subverted, though, as rather than shattering or falling apart, the moon somehow manages to hold together. Which actually makes sense; simply cutting the moon in half without doing any other damage would leave the two halves' mass unchanged and thus gravity would pull them back together.
• Origin: Spirits of the Past uses this trope, though instead of the moon being completely destroyed it's just split into tree.
• In Ouran High School Host Club, this is shown going on inside Tamaki's head in Episode 23 as a metaphor for his Berserk Button of Haruhi being pursued by another guy, the unsuspecting Kasanoda.
• A test of the Von Braun's Tandem Mirror engine in Planetes reduced a significant area of the Moon into dust. Judging from the artwork, the damage covered a region larger than the state of California.
• The Sonic X adaptation of Sonic Adventure 2 also shows the moon getting blown up, though while the games never explain how the moon presumably gets fixed, in Sonic X Eggman fixes it himself, dubbing it the "Eggmoon". He then uses the repaired moon to try and block out the sun.
• In Space Battleship Yamato, the Comet Empire, after defeating Earth's space navy, puts the cherry on its sundae of conquest by destroying the moon.
• In Symphogear, Fine attempts to destroy the moon with an enormous cannon, but it is deflected and only knocks off a chunk. The heroes then blow up the chunk, giving the moon a ring for the rest of the series.
• Z does this in Tenchi Muyo!, after he destroyed half the earth, for no other purpose than getting Tenchi's attention. Like the majority of the events in the third OVA, this is subjected to a Reset Button.
• In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Anti-Spiral uses the moon to attempt to destroy the earth, causing the Gurren Brigade to attempt to destroy the moon. Notable in that the otherwise VERY soft sci-fi makes it abundantly clear that the approach of the moon and its removal would have a negative effect on the planet (In the end, the descent can be stopped and the moon is revealed to be a giant spacecraft named "Cathedral Terra". The spacecraft is repossessed by the heroes and the real moon is pulled out of a Pocket Dimension to avoid damage to the Earth).
• In Yatterman Night, Dokurobei manages to blow up the moon during an attack on Dekkaido. A ring of debris from the detonation is all that remains of it now, save the giant ominous skull.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yugi has one of his monsters stab the moon to destroy it. Yes, it was a moon generated by another card and not the actual moon, but it still has the tide-changing effects...and it wasn't a monster card so he shouldn't have been able to attack it.^note At the time, the real-life Yu-Gi-Oh! card game hadn't been invented yet, and the creators hadn't bothered to establish a coherent set of rules for the fictional version. For the next story arc, at which point the real card game had been established, they began using a modified version of the real-life rules.
  • There is now a real-life card that references this scene - and allows a player to reenact it in the right circumstances.
• In Idolmaster: Xenoglossia, the moon was destroyed 108 years before the start of the story, causing chunks of it to fall towards Earth frequently.

Asian Animation

• Ling Long Incarnation: In the backstory, a sudden shift of the moons alignment caused a ripple effect that devastated the world just as a massive evacuation was underway, destroying civilization and preventing the exodus to the stars.

Comic Books

• The Doctor Who comic strip "The Love Invasion" featured an alien who intended to improve the lives of the human race and his (in the long run) with the first item on his agenda being "destroy the Moon". He nearly goes through with it.
• The Fantastic Four storyline Reckoning War kicks off with the Moon being destroyed. The heroes believe that the invading Badoon is the cause of this. The FF end up discovering this wasn't the case, that it was the Reckoners who attacked the Moon, trying to stop Uatu from warning his race of their arrival.
• Futurama: The first issue has the Professor getting the main trio to hide a BFG he's built, since the night before he accidentally blew up one of Jupiter's many, many, many moons with it, and he wants to hide the evidence before the cops show up. Bender, unsurprisingly, isn't too concerned.
  Bender: Eh, that planet had too many moons to begin with.
  Professor: Damn straight!
• The moon gets destroyed in the "Five Years Later" period of Legion of Super-Heroes. This was due to the events of Time and Time Again where Superman got stranded in this era. He and the Legion are able to stop the initial countdown, but the Big Bad of the storyline realizes this is the only way to send Superman back to his original time and resumes the countdown. In this case there is an Endor Holocaust, with lunar fragments being a serious threat to Earth for some time afterwards (until Earth got destroyed as well).
• The moon of the planet Sakaar (from Planet Hulk) is broken into pieces. By the end of the storyline, the same thing happens to Sakaar.
• Time Runs Out: In the final issue of Avengers, Iron Man takes out a huge chunk of the Moon blowing up an alien fleet. Fortunately, the universe is destroyed and rebooted a few hours later, before anyone misses it.
• In a What If? story about the Avengers' enemy Korvac, Korvac and the Stranger become involved in a shoving match, with the moon itself as the object being shoved. The moon, behaving at least somewhat according to the laws of physics, gets ripped to shreds by tidal forces and forms a debris ring around the Earth. There is No Endor Holocaust, but it doesn't matter because Korvac ends the universe with the Ultimate Nullifier.
• In I Hate Fairyland, Gert kills the sentient moon narrator by shooting him with a cannon. She then kills the stars to avoid any witnesses.

Fan Works

• Conquest: During the battle between the Imperial and Federation fleets over Earth, the Eclipse-class super star destroyer "Obliterator" uses its spinal superlaser to destroy the Moon along with its several hundred million inhabitants.
• In a supplementary blog for The Empress Returns (sequel to The God Empress of Ponykind), the Blood Angels and their allies loaded a moon full of doomsday weaponry before ramming it into Hive Fleet Leviathan, destroying the Tyranid synapse ships and saving Baal from being consumed.
• Shinji And Warhammer 40 K: In the final arc, Kaworu blows up a chunk of the Moon in order to try to destroy an Eldritch Abomination. Many people wonder whether humankind is definitely and inescapably screwed or it is not as bad as it looks. Fortunately it looks like the debris is floating away from Earth.

Films — Animation

• In The Transformers: The Movie, one of Cybertron's moons is blown up while Unicron is eating it, in an attempt to kill him. This attempt does not work.
  Spike: It isn't even dented! Oh shit what are we gonna do now?
• In Titan A.E., the moon is shattered by continent-sized shrapnel from the Earth-Shattering Kaboom that kickstarts the plot.

Films — Live-Action

• The Moon inexplicably combusts in Amazon Women on the Moon, with a small piece continuing to dangle from a wire, after the first astronauts to visit it incur the wrath of the Amazons living there.
• Planet of the Apes (1968): Strongly implied it happened since the protagonists claim that there's no Moon in the sky and the planet turns out to be Earth. Later expanded material would depict how it happened during World War III.
• Flash Gordon (1980): Ming pokes the moon out of orbit so it is sent on a collision course with Earth.
• J-Men Forever. The Lightning Bug has his supervillain lair on the Moon, and destroys it when he cranks his stereo up too loud.
• Man of Steel: In one of the scenery shots of Krypton, you can see its moon partially blown up.
  • This is a Continuity Nod to the Silver Age comics' justification for Krypton having forbidden rocketry. Krypton's principal moon, Wegthor, had their first space colony — until scientist Jax-Ur's nuclear missile missed the meteor he was aiming at.
• In Oblivion (2013): The alien invaders have severely crippled humanity and the Earth's climate by shattering the Moon, which gave our post-apocalyptic world an admittedly beautiful Alien Sky with the destroyed Moon casting long shades with its debris.
• In Star Trek Into Darkness, one of the moons of the Klingon homeworld (Praxis) has apparently blown up; interestingly, in this timeline, this seems to have happened 30 years before the event in the Prime universe, where it was a major plot point in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and was the event that paved the way for the end of formal hostilities between the Federation and the Klingon Empire in the TNG-era.
  • One could infer this was due to the Klingon's having studied the Narada from the previous film during the 25 years they held Nero and his crew prisoner. Presumably, by studying the technology of the mining ship, the Klingons inadvertently accelerated the accident that lead to the destruction of the moon in the Prime-verse, which was caused by over-mining.
  • A tie-in comic shows that the Big Bad of the movie was responsible. While being a brainwashed operative of Section 31, he came up with the plan of placing a bomb on the moon to destroy it, thus weakening the Klingon empire.
• The Time Machine (2002) features a sub-plot about colonizing the moon in the 2030s which goes horribly wrong and ends up with the moon being blown to pieces. Some genius decided that using nuclear weapons to dig caverns beneath the surface was a good idea. It causes a bit of an armageddon. The moon's still there but much closer to earth and totally fractured. Bits and pieces have settled into orbit or hit the Earth. When the time traveler later emerges in 802701, the smaller chunks of the moon have been pulled apart and stretched into a mini-asteroid belt.
• In Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Professor Sherman Klump dreams that he accidentally planted a nuclear weapon on the Moon instead of on an asteroid heading for Earth.
  Sherman: Oh no! I done blowed up the wrong one!
• In TV-movie catastrophic flick Impact, a piece of brown dwarf hits the Moon and gets stuck in it. The main characters then make a flight to the Moon in order to polarize it so it expulses the piece of dwarf. Doing so they break the Moon into two pieces, though it becomes somehow stable in its orbit and doesn't have any negative effects on our planet.

Literature

• In Arthur C. Clarke's companion novel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the rings of Saturn were formed when one of its moons was destroyed around 3 million years ago to create the "Star Crate", a giant monolith mirroring the one found on Earth's moon.
• In one of Stephen Baxter's more nonsensical stories, the US government executes "Operation Sunday Punch" to use an oversized nuclear bomb to blow a huge chunk out of the moon, in order to intimidate the other nations of the world. It doesn't end well.
• The novel Die dunkle Seite des Mondes (The Dark Side of the Moon) of the Charity series by Wolfgang Hohlbein ends with the Moon being shattered by a massive hyperspace wave, as a result of something that was done in one of the previous novels in the series. Considering the wave was about to do the same to Earth, the destruction of the Moon is considerably more preferable. One of the characters mentions that humans will have to learn to live without the tides, while another character points out that the tides will still be there, as the main mass of the moon is still in orbit.
• The Cthulhu Mythos short story "Remnants" by Fred Chappell has the Old Ones destroying and re-engineering the Moon into a giant five-pointed star for their own arcane purposes.
• Empire from the Ashes: Technically happens over 50,000 years before the beginning of the main plot, as standard Fourth Imperium military practice was to disguise their Planet Spaceships as appropriately-sized moons when in systems they didn't control. As a result, Dahak has spent all that time disguised as the Moon. The first book ends with the disguise being dropped, but a gravity generator is left behind at Earth so the planet still has tides.
• The Expanse:
  • In Leviathan Wakes the UN Navy blows up Deimos at the start of the siege of Mars, the debris poses a long-lasting navigation hazard and rains down on some of the domed cities. Later, a Martian ship nukes Protomolecule-infested Phoebe into rubble and sends the rubble on a course into Saturn.
  • In Persepolis Rising, one of the strongholds the Heart of the Tempest destroys while single-handedly conquering Sol is the asteroid Pallas, the third-largest in the Asteroid Belt, and home to thousands of Belters.
• In the Hugo-award winning series, The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, the fate of the moon is a prominent plot point.
• In Incarceron, it's mentioned that the Years of Rage have taken their toll on the Moon. It still appears to be in orbit, but its innards have been hollowed and its face is pockmarked, effectively killing the tides.
• In the novel Moonfall by Jack McDevitt the moon is smashed into itty-bitty bits by a mysterious giant comet just days after a commercial moonbase has been built there.
• Nightside: In the Bad Future seen in the first book, the moon is gone. When he time-travels to said Bad Future in Sharper, John witnesses the Nightside's demise in transit, including how it shatters and rains down over the already-devastated city.
• Neal Stephenson's Seveneves begins with the sentence "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." The remainder of the book is about dealing with the disasters that result.
• The Army of Mars nuked the moon in Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan.
• The Space Trilogy: In Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, it is stated that when, on the World Half Empty Moon, the people's wickedness is complete, it will be shattered.
• In Star Trek: Articles of the Federation, Romulan admiral Mendak tries to sabotage the free Reman settlement on Klorgat IV by blowing up one of the planet's moons.
• In Star Wars Legends, at one point a prototype Death Star aims at the planet Kessel, misses, and blows up its moon instead. Mako Spince was expelled from the Imperial Military Academy when he attempted to blow the Imperial seal off one of Carida's moons as a joke but used too much antimatter.
• This was Dr. Diaper's plan in the very first Captain Underpants; the Captain, George, and Harold destroy his laser device before he can go through with it. The Bad Future in book 9 is the result of Diaper being able to make it happen and the other subsequent villains completing their plans, as Mr. Krupp never got brainwashed into believing he was Captain Underpants.

Live-Action TV

• In the cartoon segments of The Aquabats! Super Show!, the moon blows up after the Aquabats succeed at rescuing Jimmy from a collapsing underwater city beneath the moon's surface.
• In one episode of The Big Bang Theory, the guys are bouncing a laser off the moon to see if it's viewable from Earth and Penny's dim-witted date is worried the moon will blow up. Leonard reassures him that they set the laser to stun.
• Doctor Who discusses this extensively in the episode "Kill the Moon". Strange happenings on the Moon (fault lines enlarging, a sudden but inexplicable increase in mass, and resulting disastrous effects on Earth tides) causes humanity to launch a mission to blow up the Moon with a bunch of nukes. By the end of the episode, they discover that the Moon is actually an egg that's about to hatch, and they subvert the trope by stopping the countdown at the last second. Then played with even further — the newborn... thing... immediately lays a new Moon-egg, which explains why we still have a moon in episodes that take place further into the future.
• The Expanse portrays the destruction of Phoebe as a last-minute attempt to keep Earth from getting the Protomolecule, as both Mars and Earth have marines en route when the missiles are launched. Deimos is destroyed shortly afterwards as reprisal.
• From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981), a description of the songs of the rock group Disaster Area:
  "[They] are, on the whole, very simple and usually follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon which then explodes for no adequately explored reason."
• In Mr. Show, America inexplicably decides to blow up the moon and is met with huge approval, with people writing patriotic country songs and throwing parties in honor of the event. When Galileo, the monkey assigned to push the launch button, asks (via sign language) why they're doing it, America erupts into outrage, until Galileo is fired and replaced with Mr. Wiggles, a monkey that doesn't know sign language. NASA goes ahead with the destruction of the moon, and they do it during a full moon so they know they got it all.
  NASA Engineer: We have the technology. The time is now. Science can wait no longer. Children are our future. America can, should, must, and will blow up the moon!
• Inverted in Space: 1999, in which the Moon gets blasted into space but survives more or less intact, but the Earth suffers devastating effects from the loss of their tide-control device. In a later episode, it's revealed that the Earth survived, but humanity screwed the environment anyway.
• The ABC Family dramedy, Three Moons Over Milford, in which the moon was shattered into three pieces by an asteroid, leaving people uncertain about the future of life on Earth.
• In The Umbrella Academy (2019), the primary event that destroys the Earth at the end of Season One is when Vanya destroys the moon during her solo concert.

Music

• Gunpowder Tim, Master-at-Arms of The Mechanisms, was found by the crew floating in the midst of the shattered remains of the Moon, his eyes burned out by the blaze of the explosion. As revealed in Gunpowder Tim vs the Moon Kaiser, he was entirely responsible.
• The song 1969 by Australian hip-hop artist Seth Sentry is set in a timeline where rather than simply visiting the moon, America instead blows it up.

Pinballs

• Pro Pinball: Fantastic Journey begins with General Yagov threatening to destroy the Moon unless his demands are met.

Radio

• Quiet, Please (1947): The scientist in "If I Should Wake Before I Die", who is a very For Science! kind of guy, shoots a nuclear bomb at the moon as an experiment. He winds up accidentally destroying the moon.

Tabletop Games

• In Hc Svnt Dracones Deimos was accidentally eaten by MarsCo's orbital construction Geomats, the computers had labelled it "flotsam" and no one caught it until it was too late. They constructed a BlueSky station in memoriam of the small moon in the wake of the PR disaster, but many still wonder if it was really an accident. Earth's moon, on the other hand, was the site of an observation base keeping an eye on the new ecosystem developing on the planet that had been nuked to sterilization a few centuries earlier, then one of the expeditions brought something back and the entire rock is covered with what looks like crystallized blood.

Video Games

• In Lost Episode 2 of Asura's Wrath, Oni Punches Mantra Asura so hard the moon splits in half, and they start blowing up more of it as they start fighting more.
• In BlazBlue, Makoto Nanaya's Astral Finish ends with her uppercutting her opponent into the sky. The force of the punch makes him hit the moon and shatter it.
• Deserves special mention in City of Heroes, cause while most examples on the video-game list are just creative licensing to show power, in City of Heroes Big Bad Lord Recluse actually does it. No-name villain Darrin Wade kills Big Good Statesman then flies to the moon to become a god, Lord Recluse's retort: He launches one of his nuclear warheads at the moon then takes a rocket up there to finish the job himself. Scary part is he has more of those warheads and nothing left to lose...
• Part of the backstory of how the Skirineen got punched out of their galatic dominance in the DEADLOCK series is that they attempted to frighten the Humans into submission by blowing up part of the moon and leaving Earth with a new ring system. This backfired horribly for them as it instead infuriated Humans into a berserker frenzy and led to a fierce counterattack, turning the tide of the war against them alongside the other known space-capable species and ultimately pushing them back.
• Zetta's Zetta Beeeam Neo attack in Disgaea 4 causes the Netherworld's moon and the asteroid belt near it to detonate in a glorious screen-filling explosion with every use.
  • The poor moon can't catch a break in Disgaea 5, either, where the number of moon-destroying attacks has increased drastically. Even some of the less impressive units like the Rabbit and Eryngya blow it to smithereens with their final attack.
• The fourth installment of the Don't Escape series, 4 Days to Survive, takes place in a world where a lunar drilling project gone wrong has caused the Moon to explode. This had understandably devastating effects on the planet, from magnetic fields going haywire to extreme weather to all of Earth becoming a wasteland. As the title implies, you have four days before what remains of the Moon falls down and wipes out all remaining life on Earth.
• Endless Space has the Sophons; a species of bungling scientists who have somehow managed to blow up their moon in their quest for new discoveries.
• Played With in Freedom Planet 2. Bakunawa has a mining laser designed to shatter stellar bodies, absorbing energy from the debris to power the ship for lengthy space travel. Both Merga and Brevon's forces take turns declaring their intention to use this on the moon, bringing ruin to Avalice below as they flee to the stars. Merga even fires it several times, but never close enough to work. Stopping Bakunawa from blowing the moon up, thereby making this a Defied Trope, is thus the focus of the final act.
• In Hyrule Warriors, Young Link's Focus Spirit attack (while using the Fierce Deity Mask) has Skull Kid summon the Moon from Termina and Link using a huge beam from his BFS to cut it in half... along with any enemies that are between him and the moon.
• The end of Kirby's Adventure sees the pink guy fly after Nightmare, eventually ending up on the moon's surface. Before the battle, the moon is whole; after the battle, it becomes permanently crescent, which is retained for every subsequent game in the series.
• In Nazi Zombies Black Ops 3 map Der Eisendrach Easter Egg mission ends with Origins gang detonating the Moon with Element 115 missles to destory Griffon Station, the moon base for Group 935.
• In Paladins, the moon in the sky appears to have been blown apart. It turns out to be a Moon goddess, Io, and some force of darkness shattered the moon long before the games' events take place. Io being the embodiment of the moon affected her in some manner (one of her pieces of card art◊ has her clutching her head in pain).
• In Rogue Trip you can use a teleporter on the flying saucer level to warp to the moon. If you placed a remote bomb at the crashed saucer and blew it up from the moon, the earth would explode, shortly followed by a hail of flaming rocks that destroys the moon and kills you. And all that for a cheap vacation.
• In Shattered Horizon, a mining accident on the moon has caused billions of tons of rocky debris and mining equipment to be thrown out in orbit around earth, essentially leaving a huge hole in the moon, as well as a ring of rocks and debris around the earth.
• In Skies of Arcadia, the six Moons bombarding the planet with meteors plays an important role in the game's backstory. More ridiculously, there's a Limit Break that allows you to smash one of them into the enemy... naturally, this is ignored once the battle's over.
• In Stellaris, one Fallen Empire's homeworld is orbited by a moon with a chunk blown out of it, which they call "The Mistake."
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In Sonic Adventure 2, Eggman blows up half of the moon with the Eclipse Cannon to show the world he's not messing around when he announces he's conquering the world. The laser blows off part of the moon, revealing a molten core and apparently having no influence on the planet's oceans. Despite this, the moon appears perfectly fine in every subsequent game (including one where the final battle happens on the surface). Word of God claims that the Moon is still broken; it's just always facing the other way when we see it (the moon's rotation doesn't work like that in real life, but this was a pretty big moon, so maybe this one does).
  • In Sonic Frontiers, Super Sonic and Sage team up to defeat The End, which takes the form of a giant purple moon. Word of God is that its Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder, and the purple moon is merely what we, the player, perceive it as, while Sonic and Sage each perceive it as something else entirely. While Sonic is able to damage it significantly, it takes an Heroic Sacrifice from Sage to completely destroy it.
• Suzuki Bakuhatsu: This is what happens if you fail to separate the moon from the bomb in the "Moon Bomb" stage, with an aftermath that depicts Earth becoming a Saturn-like planet one year later.
• While it doesn't happen in-game in Team Fortress 2, Saxton Hale accidentally blows up the moon in the non-canon Mac update comic. Using an Apple product called iBlewUpTheMoon.
• A version of this happens in The Legend of Dragoon after destroying the final boss, although it technically isn't a moon, It's the unborn god of destruction. First it's shown collapsing in on itself into nothingness, followed by a brief pause, followed by a massive explosion that engulfs the tree that literally created life. Did we mention how big the tree was?
• In Touhou Soccer, one of Youmu Konpaku's better shots has her completely ignore the ball, fly up into the air, and to one side of the moon. She then slices the Japanese characters for her shot into the moon, and then SLICE IT IN HALF. Explosion and everything. She then apparently remembers the ball and comes down and whacks the ball with her sword. The soccer ball, to its credit, handles a slash that cleaved the moon in two very well, as it may well be Made of Indestructium.
• Happens with every casting of Fei's Big Bang spell in Xeno Gears. Also an example of Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke.
• According to the Books of Sorrow, Xivu Arath once achieved a Mutual Kill against her brother Oryx by blowing up the war moon they both were on after he killed her. They got better, as Hive gods do, and the experience taught Oryx a valuable lesson about how to protect himself from Earth Shattering Kabooms in general, which later helped him destroy the Ecumene (which did a lot of that trying to kill him).
• In Dragon: Marked for Death, the bad ending has the newly-revived Astral Dragon Atruum nuking the Alabaster Moon into chunks with his Breath Weapon, killing or at least heavily crippling his rival Primatus and his Deva agents, and thus removing the last obstacle between himself and devouring all the souls of mankind.

Web Animation

• In DEATH BATTLE!, Thor launches Wonder Woman all the way to the moon, then throws Mjolnir after her. Wonder Woman tanks the impact with her bracelets, and the resulting shockwave blows the moon to pieces.
• In hololive - Holo no Graffiti, the episode "Fly Me to the Moon" starts off with Botan Shishiron throwing Watame Tsunomaki through the office window and onto the street, with Watame sailing for 88m. Next up is Noel Shirogane, who throws Marine Houshou through the wall into the next building, but only scoring 80m. The last contestants are Aname Kanata spinning Haachama with enough force to throw her through the ceiling, through the stratosphere, into the moon, and out the other side, with Haachama no worse for wear. The final distance is 384,400 km.
• Port by the Sea: The opening illustrations depict a shattered moon that would come about if the titan Tiamat should ever escape his imprisonment. And indeed, the moon is eventually revealed to be shattered, with Port and Umi on a quest to repair it.
• The Most Epic Story Ever Told in All of Human History: Ridiculously Epic destroys the moon as part of his epic rampage at the end of the trailer.
• RWBY: Remnant's moon is mysteriously half-shattered, leaking a dense field of debris. Oddly, most of the debris seems to stay in the same relative position, with the moon looking like it was just shattered for thousands of years. The moon also rotates, resulting in periods where the debris field faces away from Remnant and making the moon seem whole.
  • One of humanity's theories is a fairy tale called The Gift of the Moon that claims it's really the sun, which humanity accidentally broke. After building a new fake sun made of glass, the weakened original sun was relegated to lighting the night sky as the moon.
  • In truth, long ago ancient humanity was destroyed when Salem rebelled against the gods. Abandoning Remnant and Salem, the God of Darkness smashed the moon as a warning against disrespecting gods while the God of Light resurrected Salem's dead lover, Ozma, to guide a reborn humanity to redemption. Salem's refusal to acknowledge the moon's warning and Ozma's inability to ignore it has locked them into a Forever War for the fate of humanity.

Webcomics

• In Darths & Droids, Naboo's moon is destroyed in order to interfere with the Gungans' battle tactics.
• In the distant past of Drowtales the wars between the elves managed to damage one of the nine moons resulting in a large piece impacting the surface and creating the Underworld where the elves eventually fled once they had wrecked the surface too much to survive.
• Homestuck:
  • Jack Noir does this to Prospit's (inhabited) moon. Technically, he only broke the chain connecting it to Prospit and crashed it into Skaia, but the idea is the same.
  • Later on, B2 Jack and Her Imperious Condescension play this straight on the moons of B2!Prospit and B2!Derse, with a Breath Weapon and Eye Beams respectively. Their reasons are different, but they somehow pull this off at the same time.
• Richard managed this in Looking for Group while trying to extinguish a burning village. He wanted a high five afterward.
• Real Life Comics questions if NASA only wanted pictures when crashing things into the moon.
• Another example of a different moon, the UNS of Schlock Mercenary accidentally broke Io while strip mining it. The nickel-iron core popped out and crashed into Jupiter, hence the saying "not for all the nickels in Jupiter".
• Suggested by A Softer World as a solution for Teen Pregnancy. Among other things.
  Many problems. One solution.
• Not our moon, but in Vexxarr the test firing of the Zorp cannon destroyed Deimos.
• This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has a scientist pretends he wants to explode Mars to get some funding.
• Soul Symphony: The moon in Olivia's Soul World appears to be permanently crescent because a majority of it actually exploded.

Web Original

• The now-defunct Citizens' Association to Blow Up the Moon. CABUM
• In Colour My Dreams, you need to do this after solving a puzzle to get past the endless hallway.
• Frank J. Fleming of the blog IMAO, advocates the United States Nuking the Moon to convince other countries that the U.S. is crazy and not to be messed with.
• Tech Infantry has the Moon blown up in order to have the broken pieces rain down upon the Earth and make it uninhabitable.
• In the Real-Time Fandub of Sonic Adventure 2, Eggman blows up the moon, just like in the original game. The difference is, there are two versions of this scene; in the Dark Story version, it's immediately preceded by a drunken tirade against Shadow the Hedgehog, seen below.
  Eggman: I've come to make an announcement: Shadow the Hedgehog's a bitch-ass motherfucker. He pissed on my fucking wife. That's right, he took his hedgehog-fuckin' quilly dick out and he pissed on my fucking wife, and he said his dick was "THIS BIG," and I said "that's disgusting," so I'm making a callout post on my Twitter.com: Shadow the Hedgehog, you've got a small dick. It's the size of this walnut except WAY smaller. And guess what? Here's what my dong looks like! BWSHHH!! That's right, baby. All points, no quills, no pillows — look at that, it looks like two balls and a bong. He fucked my wife, so guess what, I'm gonna fuck the Earth. That's right, this is what you get: MY SUPER LASER PISS!! Except I'm not gonna piss on the Earth, I'm gonna go higher! I'M PISSING ON THE MOON! How do you like that, Obama?! I PISSED ON THE MOON, YOU IDIOT! You have twenty-three hours before the piss DRRRRROPLLLLLETS hit the fucking Earth! Now get out of my fucking sight before I piss on you too!

Western Animation

• Amphibia: During the Grand Finale, The Core intends to use Amphibia's moon to crash into the planet's surface and wipe out all life on it, to prevent this, Anne Boonchuy sacrifices herself by absorbing the powers of the Calamity Gems to become all-powerful and destroying Amphibia's moon, ending The Core in the process.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: A pink, unshaven man appears out of nowhere (like most anything on the show) and asks the Aqua Teens to help him blow up the Moon. As it quickly turns out, he’s actually a Wookie were-beast, and needed the Moon gone so he couldn’t transform. It happens anyway, but that’s because the Mooninites blew up Yoda for kicks.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: In the first season finale, Zhao kidnaps and then kills the moon spirit to rob the waterbenders of their power. It's not clear if the moon was physically destroyed/wiped from existence, but at the very least he got it to stop reflecting light. Somewhat averts No Endor Holocaust in that they make it clear the moon's death would be disastrous to the whole world. As it stands, however, all it did was force a Heroic Sacrifice to fix the moon and create one very pissed off ocean spirit kaiju.
• Beast Wars: The planet that the Maximals and Predacons land on has two moons. At the end of season 1, one of them turns out to be an alien Kill Sat, which Optimus Primal ends up destroying by Heroic Sacrifice.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: "Wirewolf" Booster and Mira flew Star Cruiser 42 into the moon, blowing it up so as to revert Wirewolf back to Ty Parsec.
• Camp Lazlo: Lazlo, Raj, and Clam mistake Lumpus' giant telescope for a canon and think he wants to blow up the moon. They throw a protest against this and try to convince him not to.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: Aliens destroy the moon and repair it with their armpit cheese.
• Home Movies features a song that repeatedly demands the listener blow up the moon, though it never actually happens.
• Looney Tunes: In "Haredevil Hare", Marvin the Martian attempts to blow up the Earth from the Moon, but ends up blowing the Moon in half instead, leaving only a crumbling crescent.
• Tex Avery: Non-explosive version: in "Billy Boy", the titular billy goat ends up eating the entire moon.
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2021): Right from the first episode, it's shown there are multiple moons in the sky, one of which has been shattered. It eventually turns out King Grayskull caused it after being corrupted by the power of Havok.
• Megas XLR: Coop once blew up part of the moon "Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Coop", which caused major climate change (a subversion of No Endor Holocaust). When asked if he was concerned about this, he replied, "What does that have to do with bubblegum ice cream?" Kiva made him fix it in the credits. The episode basically told you from the start what was going to happen: in Kiva's time, the moon has a lot less mass.
• Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends: The Grand Finale opens with a shot of the Shadoen fleet blowing up the moon and uses the Eiffel Tower Effect several times over to demonstrate in minute detail exactly how much destruction blowing up the moon actually causes. The whole thing is soon revealed to be a simulation, though they still plan on blowing up the moon.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks:
  • "Cupid's Errant Arrow": The Cerritos and Vancouver are assigned to deliberately implode an unstable moon that is going to crash into its parent planet and kill everyone on it.
  • "Strange Energies": After gaining godlike powers, Ransom zaps the Apergosian moon out of existence.
• Teen Titans Go!: In "Starfire the Terrible", Starfire dedicates her life to killing Robin to make him feel better. After she got the hang of villainy, she decides to step up her game by rigging the moon to explode. Cyborg, Raven, and Beast Boy, still unconvinced that Starfire is even capable of evil, laugh at her seemingly ridiculous claim. Cut to the surface of the moon where sticks of dynamite are embedded everywhere and all connected to a countdown device that looks suspiciously like a toaster. Once the timer reaches zero...it pops out toast...then blows up the moon.
• Thundarr the Barbarian: In the Opening Narration a rogue planet passes between the Earth and the Moon, and its gravitational field cracks the latter in half, like a walnut. This doesn't affect its orbit in the slightest, but it does end human civilization. The shattered remnants of the moon can be occasionally seen in the night sky during episodes.
• T.U.F.F. Puppy: In "Toast of T.U.F.F.", Verminious Snaptrap plans to blow up the moon because he thinks it's made of cheese, which he can't eat due to having a severe cheese allergy (which is ironic because he is a rat). Ollie tries to talk him out of it, saying that the Moon is not in fact, made of cheese, but Snaptrap says that he's really blowing up the moon to get rid of the werewolves.

Real Life

• Here's an article on what might happen if the moon were destroyed. Bottom line: the problem of falling debris wouldn't be nearly as bad as getting hit by an object from deep space, but long-term effects on the environment from the loss of tides and the loss of moonlight could be pretty terrible. Also, we might get rings.
• The rings orbiting the planets Saturn and Uranus may have formed when a moon orbiting it broke up either by straying too close to its parent planet or was destroyed in a collision with another moon.
• Uranus' moon Miranda has bizarre terrain and it was once thought that long ago it was completely shattered and has since reformed. This theory is no longer considered credible. Current thinking is that Miranda once had a subsurface ocean like Europa and Enceladus are thought to, but the whole thing froze and warped the surface.
• Some planets may eventually lose their moons billions of years from now. Because it is orbiting the Red Planet faster than that planet can spin, the Martian moon Phobos may eventually collide with Mars, and it is widely believed that it will not be the first moon Mars has lost this way; and even though the Moon is actually moving away from the Earth until it slows down so much that it is literally stuck above one side of our planet permanently,^note Actually not; this process is expected not to happen until much before the Sun had gone red giant and died the dying and expanding Sun will eventually cause the Moon to spiral back toward Earth, causing it to shatter and collide with our own planet^note Actually the Moon will be disrupted by Earth's tidal forces, forming a short-lived ring system before the Sun destroys our planet (ironically, this was also how our Moon was born).
  • Triton, Neptune's largest moon, is spiraling towards its host planet, and will eventually enter the planet's Roche Limit in about 3.6 billion years. Once this happens, Triton will actually disintegrate because of Neptune's tidal forces; Triton will become a huge set of visible rings around Neptune (Triton out-masses Saturn's rings several hundred times over).
  • Two of Uranus's irregular moons, Cupid and Belinda, are expected to collide with each other between one thousand and one million years from now. No one is entirely sure what the collision's results will be, but one hypothesis is that one or both moons will shatter and create a new ring system.
• The impact that formed the South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest confirmed lunar crater and one of the largest known in the Solar System, is thought to have been one of a body moving at a very oblique angle and relatively low velocity. Had it hit at a higher speed and angle, it's thought it could have shattered the Moon.
• For a very small example: When NASA demonstrated asteroid deflection by running the DART spacecraft into Dimorphos, the moon orbiting the asteroid Didymos, there was concern that the impact might shatter the moon. The mission design was checked to make sure that that could not happen and Dimorphos was shoved along in its orbit. But the impact still generated a cloud of debris that took months to disperse.

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