At long last, a Moon landing for SpaceX — just not the kind it was hoping for.
After months of anticipation, a discarded upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is believed to have careened into the Moon on early Wednesday morning. It exploded on impact, causing a flash that may have been visible from Earth, and created a large crater.
Astronomers, who have been closely monitoring the stray rocket, projected it would smash into the lunar surface at 5,400 miles per hour, which is about seven times the speed of sound here on our home planet. At such a velocity, NASA estimated it would blow open a crater about 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep, though others have estimated that it could be up to 100 feet wide.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been promising the Moon when it comes to SpaceX’s lunar ambitions. Its Starship megarocket is being built to bring cargo to the lunar surface, and hopefully deposit NASA astronauts there in a historic return. He even plans to construct a Moon base with a factory that can churn out AI satellites. But so far, no SpaceX craft has made it into the Moon’s orbit, let alone land on it.
The discarded Falcon 9 rocket part had been lingering in space for over a year. It was jettisoned during a January 2025 mission that brought two lunar landers, Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Hakuto-R, to the Moon. Astronomers soon suspected that it would fall into the Moon’s orbit, and in late April, a report more or less confirmed suspicions that it would slam into the rocky satellite.
Because the explosion — or in SpaceX’s euphemistic parlance, the rapid unscheduled disassembly — was difficult to observe in the moment, it might take some time before scientists can piece together everything that happened.
Another crater will make little difference to the Moon. Because it has no protective atmosphere, it’s surface is bombarded by meteoroids on a daily basis. One “with the same energy as the upper stage hits the Moon about every six days,” according to NASA.
Still, the impact will raise questions about the best practices for space junk and whether it’s negligent to discard spent rocket parts near the Moon’s orbit.
This isn’t the first time that human debris has smashed into the lunar surface. NASA deliberately steered the discarded stages of its Saturn V rockets into the Moon during the Apollo missions in the 1970s. And in 2009, it also crashed a rocket part into the Moon to study the impact.
Scientists will similarly hope to learn more from the accidental SpaceX crash landing, including insights into the physics of the material kicked up by the explosion in a low gravity environment, where ejecta could travel for miles.
“This may be of some — probably minor — scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it,” Bill Gray, an astronomer who created the Project Pluto software used to track near-Earth objects, and who published the report predicting the rocket part’s crash landing, wrote on his website. “It doesn’t present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.”
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