The Falcon 9 rocket’s liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Credit: Cristóbal Herrera/EPA
This Wednesday, at around 06:35:37.5 UTC, a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage is expected to strike sunlit terrain near Einstein Crater. It will be traveling at roughly 8,700 kilometers per hour, or 5,400 miles per hour.
The abandoned rocket part shouldn’t cause any particular problems, and it might actually be useful, giving astronomers a rare chance to watch a known piece of space junk hit another world in real time. It will barely scar the Moon and won’t affect the Earth at all. But as nations and companies prepare to send more machines (and people) to the lunar surface, the space around the Moon is becoming a place that must be tracked, managed, and cleaned up before opening up traffic routes around it.
An Unplanned Crash
The rocket launched on Jan. 15, 2025, carrying two private Moon landers: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which later became the first private spacecraft to achieve a fully successful lunar landing, and Japan’s ispace Hakuto-R Resilience, which crashed.
After release, the roughly 12-meter, 3,900-kilogram rocket stage began drifting through a tangled path shaped by Earth, the Moon and the Sun. Bill Gray, an independent astronomer and tracking-software writer, followed its orbit for months. By last September, he determined that it would pass close to the Moon on Aug. 5, 2026. Then, after refining the numbers, he realized it would not miss.
“Sometime around March, I think it was, it became a, ‘Yeah, this is gonna happen. We just have to figure out exactly where and when,’” Gray told CBC.
He predicts the stage will hit the Moon’s sunlit limb near Einstein Crater at about 8,700 kilometers per hour (5,400 miles per hour). The timing is strikingly precise: 2:35:37.5 a.m. Eastern time, according to astronomers preparing to observe it.
The crash should release energy equal to about three tons of TNT. Benjamin Fernando, an astronomer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, expects a crater about 27 meters wide and 5 meters deep. Earth-based telescopes will not see the crater itself, but orbiters will.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea’s Danuri orbiter will take before-and-after images. Danuri may pass within a mile or two of the rocket only two minutes before impact.
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Can We See It?
The flash will be difficult to see. It should last less than a second, and the crash will happen on the bright side of the moon. The plume may offer a better target.
“The gravity on the moon is low and there is no wind to blow the dust away,” Fernando told AP.
That means the impact could send dust and rubble several miles above the surface, where telescopes may track it for minutes. CBC reported that astronomers estimate more than one million kilograms of debris could rise before falling back.
Fernando urged both professional and skilled amateur astronomers to keep an eye on it.
“There are two things that [you] can try and observe, either the plume or the flash. The truth is, I think the flash is going to be tough because it’s on the lit side of the Moon and it’s very short-lived,” Fernando said. “But that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t try.”
Human-made objects have hit the Moon before. Apollo rocket stages struck it on purpose for seismic studies. NASA’s LCROSS mission slammed into the Moon in 2009 while searching for water ice. ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft crashed in 2006, and telescopes caught its flash near the lunar day-night boundary. In 2022, a rocket body hit the lunar far side and left a double crater; later research identified it as likely the Long March 3C upper stage from China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission.
This strike will be the second known accidental crash by a dead rocket.
Recovery of Falcon 9, first stage. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Growing Traffic
Scientists do not expect this impact to endanger anything. But the event arrives as the Moon grows busier.
“Things are getting crowded up there,” Gray told AP.
The United States and China plan to send astronauts back to the Moon in the next few years. NASA also wants longer stays, surface habitats, and regular cargo traffic.
“Part of the reason for our interest in this event is to figure out how much of a hazard debris impacts pose to future astronauts,” Fernando added.
A direct hit on an astronaut remains unlikely. The broader concern involves dust and fragments falling back onto the infrastructure that is to be built there.
Gray is already tracking about a dozen other objects near the Moon. None appear headed for impact. He is also watching the upper stage of China’s Chang’e 3 rocket, launched in 2013.
For astronomers, the crash offers a rare chance to test their models against a real impact they can predict almost to the second. The Moon is no longer empty territory. As lunar traffic grows, we must keep an eye out for discarded space debris.