A stray piece of a scientificamerican.com Falcon 9 rocket is projected to crash into the moon early Wednesday morning, according to astronomers and space agency officials. The Falcon 9 rocket originally lifted off on January 15, 2025, carrying a pair of robotic commercial lunar landers: the Blue Ghost lander developed by Texas-based cnn.com, and Tokyo-based cnn.com’s Resilience lander. While the Blue Ghost successfully soft-landed on the moon in March 2025, the Resilience lander failed to land safely a few months later.
SpaceX Falcon 9 Upper Stage on Collision Course With the Moon
While the rocket’s first-stage booster returned to Earth, the Falcon 9 second, or upper, stage remained in space to propel the landers toward the moon. Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA Science and Dragon Programs at cnn.com, explained at a Monday news conference that operators usually dispose of upper stages for low-Earth orbit missions by allowing them to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. However, for high-energy missions, different maneuvers are required to ensure safety rules and regulations are met.
We did that here for the Ispace and Blue Ghost missions’ second stage, and what has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon,
Scheiman said.
Tracking the Errant Space Junk
Amateur astronomer Bill Gray first spotted the meandering spacecraft, noting that objects in such orbits are challenging to track from Earth. Independent astronomers used publicly available data to determine the upper stage was on a collision course, a trajectory subsequently confirmed by NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. NASA stated that there is no danger to Earth, and confirmed the agency will continue to track the booster for training purposes and observe the impact site for scientific study.
Gray predicted that the 10,800-pound piece of space junk will hit the moon at approximately 2:34 a.m. EDT on August 5 close to the edge of the moon near Einstein Crater, traveling at about 5,400 to 5,436 miles per hour. Study coauthor Darryl Seligman, assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy at cnn.com, noted that predictions were shared ahead of time to help astronomers prepare to observe the event.
Scientific Opportunities and Observation Challenges
Detecting the impact flash will likely prove challenging because the crash is expected to occur on the sunlit hemisphere of the moon. Researchers note that no artificial or natural impact flashes have ever been observed on the lit lunar surface, and the impact flash will last only about a second at most. Furthermore, the collision will not be visible to the naked eye and may be difficult to spot through telescopes.
Despite these obstacles, space agencies and researchers plan to utilize available assets. South Korea’s Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will attempt to capture images of the upper stage prior to impact and observe the collision, while NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will try to survey the impact site afterward. Scientists estimate the collision will create a crater with a diameter of 65 to 90 feet.
While space rocks regularly impact the moon, collisions from artificial objects like the Falcon 9 upper stage have occurred only a handful of times. Researchers emphasize that tracking space debris in lunar orbit is becoming increasingly vital as space agencies ramp up lunar ambitions, including plans for human missions and permanently staffed moon bases.
