A discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage is believed to have slammed into the Moon early Wednesday, carving a fresh crater on the lunar surface after drifting uncontrolled for more than a year and a half.
The roughly 4,000-kilogram (about 8,800-pound) rocket body, roughly the size of a school bus or five-story building, struck near Einstein Crater on the Moon’s western limb at approximately 2:35 a.m. Eastern Time (06:35 UTC). Tracking data indicated an impact speed of about 5,400 mph (8,700 km/h), or more than seven times the speed of sound. NASA and independent astronomers had assigned a near-certain probability to the collision in the days leading up to the event.
The upper stage launched from Kennedy Space Center on January 15, 2025, as part of a Falcon 9 mission carrying two commercial lunar landers: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which successfully soft-landed on the Moon in March 2025, and ispace’s Hakuto-R Resilience, which crashed during its landing attempt. After boosting the payloads onto their trajectories, the spent upper stage remained in a high, Moon-crossing orbit. Over subsequent months, solar radiation pressure and gravitational influences from Earth and the Moon gradually altered its path until an impact became inevitable.
SpaceX described the outcome as unintentional. “What has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path toward the moon,” Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX director of NASA science and Dragon programs, told reporters earlier this week. For many Earth-orbit missions, Falcon 9 upper stages are deliberately deorbited to burn up in the atmosphere. This higher-energy lunar injection left insufficient residual propellant for an alternative disposal trajectory such as a heliocentric orbit.
Astronomer Bill Gray of Project Pluto first publicly flagged the eventual collision months earlier after analyzing extensive observational data. NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies later confirmed the trajectory. The predicted impact site lay on sunlit terrain near the lunar limb as seen from Earth, close to Einstein and Bell craters. Because the Moon lacks an atmosphere, the stage struck at full velocity. Scientists estimated the collision would excavate a crater roughly 18 to 30 meters (60 to 90 feet) across and several meters deep, while ejecting a plume of lunar dust and rock.
The impact posed no danger to Earth. NASA noted that meteoroids of comparable energy strike the Moon every few days. Human-made objects have hit the lunar surface before, including intentional impacts during the Apollo era and an accidental Chinese Long March rocket stage that created a double crater on the far side in 2022. This event marks only the second confirmed accidental crash of discarded rocket hardware on the Moon.
Scientists viewed the collision as a rare natural experiment. Observations of the fresh crater and any ejecta plume can improve models of impact physics, the behavior of lunar regolith, and the effects of artificial debris on the surface. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea’s Danuri spacecraft are expected to image the site in the coming days or weeks, providing before-and-after comparisons. Ground-based telescopes sought any visible flash or rising dust cloud, though the sunlit location and geometry near the limb made detection challenging. Preliminary reports from some observatories noted possible light variations around the predicted time.
The episode underscores broader concerns about space debris management as commercial and national activity expands beyond low Earth orbit. With NASA’s Artemis program, China’s lunar ambitions, and a growing number of private missions, the volume of hardware operating in cislunar space is increasing. Spent stages and other objects left in unstable or poorly controlled orbits can eventually intersect the Moon or other bodies. Experts have noted that disposal practices for high-energy trajectories remain less standardized than those for near-Earth missions.
For now, the Falcon 9 upper stage has added another piece of human-made material to the lunar surface. Orbiting cameras will soon reveal the precise location and dimensions of the new crater, turning an unintended collision into a data point for future exploration. NASA has stated it will use the event both for scientific study and as a training opportunity in tracking objects far from Earth.