A spent SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) Falcon 9 upper stage crashed into the Moon in the early hours of Wednesday, near Einstein Crater on the Moon’s western limb. NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies had put the odds at 100%, and independent trackers pinned the impact to roughly 6:35 a.m. UTC, or 2:35 a.m. Eastern time.
The stage had drifted unplanned since early last year. Solar activity and gravity nudged it onto a collision course with the Moon rather than back down through Earth’s atmosphere, where spent rocket stages typically burn up.
On January 15, 2025, the Falcon 9 launched two lunar landers under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative: Firefly Aerospace’s (Nasdaq: FLY) Blue Ghost lander and ispace’s (TYO: 9348) Resilience spacecraft, also known as Hakuto-R Mission 2. Blue Ghost stuck its landing in Mare Crisium that March and ran science instruments on the surface for NASA. Resilience wasn’t as lucky, crashing during its own touchdown attempt that June.
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The Falcon 9 upper stage should have faded into the background as ordinary orbital debris once it released both spacecraft. Instead, it stayed adrift in an orbit that periodically swung back through the Moon’s path, gradually bending toward an impact nobody flagged until independent astronomers spotted it using public tracking data.
Bill Gray, an astronomer who runs Project Pluto and writes the orbital tracking software many amateur observers rely on, first identified the impending impact and refined the predicted time and location as more observations came in, narrowing it down to a spot near Einstein and Bell craters. NASA’s asteroid-tracking center later confirmed the trajectory independently.
A SpaceX representative said the company followed standard disposal procedures when it released the stage in 2025, and that a mix of solar activity and gravity ultimately pulled it toward the Moon. NASA said in a statement that Earth faces no risk from the impact.
The upper stage weighed about 4 metric tons, roughly 8,800 pounds, and measured about 45 feet long. It struck the lunar surface at approximately 5,400 miles per hour, releasing energy equivalent to nearly 3 tons of TNT.
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NASA expected the collision to leave a crater roughly 60 feet across and 12 feet deep, while an independent study of the event put the range as high as 100 feet wide. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to slow incoming objects or burn them up, a natural impactor with similar energy strikes the surface roughly every six days. What made this one unusual wasn’t the force — scientists knew exactly when and where it was coming.
South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter attempted to observe the stage in the moments before impact, and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter plans to survey the impact site afterward, though officials say usable images could take up to two weeks to come back. Astronomers have never recorded a natural or artificial impact flash on the sunlit side of the Moon, and this impact happened on the daylight side, so scientists expected the flash itself to be extremely faint at best. The more promising target was the ejecta plume, the cloud of dust and rock the impact would throw upward, which one preprint study estimated could scatter debris as far as 1,000 kilometers across the surface.
NASA’s Artemis program aims to establish a lasting human presence on the Moon, and ejecta from any impact, artificial or natural, is a real hazard for future astronauts and hardware. Watching this event in real time gives scientists a rare chance to calibrate their models against actual data instead of simulations.
Human-made objects have hit the Moon before, starting with the Soviet Union’s deliberate Luna 2 impact in 1959 and continuing through NASA’s Apollo-era practice of crashing spent Saturn V third stages into the surface to trigger seismic readings. In 2009, NASA intentionally aimed a rocket stage at a permanently shadowed crater near the lunar south pole and confirmed the presence of water ice in the debris it kicked up.
The closest parallel came in March 2022, when a mystery rocket body slammed into the Moon’s far side and gouged out an unusual double crater. Trackers initially misidentified that object as a Falcon 9 upper stage before further tracking data pointed to a Chinese Long March 3C rocket instead. This week’s impact is the real thing many people thought they were reading about back in 2022.
There’s currently no binding international standard requiring companies to steer spent stages away from the Moon, and SpaceX has said it’s working with NASA and other agencies on better disposal practices for future high-energy missions. It’s a small problem today, but it won’t stay small if lunar traffic keeps increasing the way NASA, SpaceX, and China’s space program all expect it to over the next decade.
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