RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience lunar landers, lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 15, 2025. —GREGG NEWTON/AFP —Getty Images
Humanity has been putting metal on the moon ever since Sept. 13, 1959, when the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 spacecraft completed a 36-hour translunar journey, performing a planned crash landing between the Sea of Rains and the Sea of Serenity on the moon’s near side. Since then, nearly 70 spacecraft and spent boosters have soft landed or crash landed on the moon —including six ships carrying people. This week one more big hunk of hardware is set to join them: the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, on track for an unplanned lunar impact on Wednesday, Aug. 5, at 2:35 a.m. ET, after a 19-month journey.
The 230-ft. Falcon 9 lifted off from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 15, 2025, packed with a pair of spacecraft bound for the moon. One of them, the Blue Ghost lander , built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, landed on the moon on March 2, 2025, becoming the first privately built ship to pull off a completely successful lunar touchdown. The other, the Resilience lander, built by the Japanese company ispace , wasn’t so fortunate, crash-landing on the moon on June 5, 2025, after its laser range-finder failed. At the beginning of their missions, once the ships had climbed to near-Earth space, both of them relied on the Falcon 9’s 45-ft. upper stage to blast them away from the Earth and outward to the moon. After releasing the two lunar landers, that Falcon stage was supposed to fall harmlessly away, but instead it’s hung around.
Why is the SpaceX rocket booster crashing into the moon?
Typically, a Falcon 9’s second stage used for a deep space mission would enter a highly elliptical orbit of the Earth and ultimately be brought down by atmospheric drag for a fiery reentry. But for reasons not quite clear, this stage managed to avoid the atmosphere on its closer approaches to Earth, and persist in an orbit that brought it nearer and nearer the moon.
On April 29, 2026 astronomer Bill Gray first predicted the second stage’s lunar crack-up and the precise date and time it would happen. Gray is the author of the Project Pluto website, which relies on telescope surveys by amateur astronomers , and software he wrote to compute orbits of objects the U.S. military doesn’t track . Using this information, he was also able to forecast the precise spot the spent booster will hit the moon: near the Einstein Crater at the far western lunar horizon.
What is the history of rockets crashing into the moon?
This is not the first time a spent rocket stage will strike the lunar surface. During the Apollo landings in the 1960s and 1970s, the empty third stage of the Saturn V rocket was deliberately targeted for a lunar impact, with the goal of setting off small moonquakes that could be detected by the seismographs left by earlier landing missions.
Analyzing a temblor that resulted from a known object of a known mass striking the moon at a known speed can reveal valuable information about the structure of the lunar interior. During the near-disastrous Apollo 13 mission in 1970, commander Jim Lovell was informed of the successful impact while piloting his crippled spacecraft around the moon. “Well,” he said to the ground, “at least something worked on this flight.”
Can you see the SpaceX lunar crash from Earth?
For the Falcon 9 upper stage, like the Saturn V third stage, the size and speed metrics are known. Like all liquid-fueled rockets, the stage is essentially hollow—basically a giant fuel tank with an engine at its business end. That means it carries much less mass than a solid object of the same size, like an asteroid. Still, it weighs nearly 45 tons and is moving at 5,400 miles per hour. With that size and speed, Gray calculates, its impact will release a blast equal to 15,000 sticks of dynamite—or three tons. That will produce a considerable debris plume.
“Let's say that rocks are blasted out at 100 meters a second (224 mph),” Gray writes on the Project Pluto site. “On the moon, if you are a rock shooting upward at that speed, you will rise for about one minute, reaching a height of three kilometers (1.9 mi.). You'll then plummet down for a minute and be returned to the moon.”
That raises the possibility of observing the flash and plume with telescopes and even binoculars from Earth. “The impact probably won't be visible from Earth,” Gray writes. “The ejecta plume might be. Surprises are possible; it will probably be at least worth taking a look.”
Other researchers predict a much more dramatic event. In a study appearing on the pre-publication site arxiv, computer models suggest an ejecta spike rising as high as 100 km (62 mi.) and spreading 183 km (114 mi.) laterally from the impact point.
The site of the impact will make a difference in visibility. Located so close to the western edge—or limb—of the moon, the bright plume resulting from impact might extend out into the black background of space, setting up a stark, easily discernible light-dark contrast.
Whatever the size of the blast, skygazers will certainly be monitoring it —and so will at least one spacecraft, NASA’s trusty Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). LRO has been circling the moon since 2009, and has returned albums of remarkable images—including overhead shots of the six Apollo landing sites . The satellite will not be in position to witness the Aug. 5 impact as it takes place, but it did pass over the site on July 29 and will be over it again on Aug. 12. Those sequential passes will allow comparison shots and measurements of the crater the rocket stage produces. Gray predicts a pit more than 50 ft. across.
“After the impact we might have a little bit more knowledge of where it is,” LRO project scientist Brent Garry told Space.com. “We can do some additional targeting about a wee...
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