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SpaceX rocket piece believed to have crashed into Moon

scienceAug 5, 2026616,741

A four-tonne piece of a discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage is believed to have unintentionally crashed into the Moon early Wednesday after floating in space since January 2025, when the rocket boosted a Firefly Aerospace lunar lander. The stage was predicted to strike at about 5,400 miles per hour 8,690 km/h and to hit around 6:35 a.m. BST, creating a roughly 60-foot 18-metre wide and 12-foot four-metre deep crater and kicking up a plume of lunar dust. NASA said the impact posed no danger to Earth and that scientists will attempt to image the site before and after the collision to study ejecta and refine tracking techniques. SpaceX director Julianna Scheiman attributed the redirected trajectory to a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces; the stage had dumped its remaining fuel and could not be controlled. Bill Gray, developer of widely used astronomy software, said the event may offer minor scientific value while highlighting disposal issues for leftover space hardware. Rocket-stage impacts on the Moon are rare but not unprecedented: a Chinese rocket stage struck the Moon in March 2022 and NASA intentionally crashed a stage in 2009; several recent soft-landing attempts instead ended in crashes including Russia's Luna-25 in 2023 and India's Chandrayaan-2 in 2019.

The Verge
@theverge.com

"SpaceX remains its own biggest customer. There just aren’t enough other people who want its rockets. And, I dunno, maybe if the rockets were a primary focus of the company, SpaceX wouldn’t be in danger of blasting a new crater into the Moon with its space trash." Read more: buff.ly/d9lBTQN

Verge headline: SpaceX is barely Space and mostly X
by Elizabeth Lopatto

Illustration depicts Elon Musk amidst flying money and a crashing line graph
47444d ago
Carl Quintanilla
@carlquintanilla.bsky.social

(AFP) - A four-ton piece of a SpaceX rocket was believed to have unintentionally crashed into the Moon on Wednesday .. @afp.com $SPCX www.yahoo.com/news/science...

28445d ago
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