A piece of SpaceX rocket debris from last year likely struck the Moon at high speed early Wednesday morning. Although confirmation of the impact might take several hours, the event was unintentional. The object, roughly the size of a school bus, is the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket launched by SpaceX in January 2025, carrying a lunar lander from Firefly Aerospace. Weighing about 4 metric tons (around 4,000 kg), it was expected to collide with the Moon around 2:35 a.m. ET, traveling at approximately 5,400 miles per hour (8,690 km/h). No orbiting lunar spacecraft were positioned to witness the impact in real-time.
The debris would have kicked up a cloud of lunar dust illuminated by sunlight, but it would be difficult to see with the naked eye from Earth. Scientists will probably need several hours to verify the crash by analyzing telescope images from observatories in the Americas, reported the BBC. SpaceX clarified that the impact was not intentional. The debris was expected to hit Einstein Crater on the Moon’s western limb, a region that’s often hard to observe from Earth.
Typically, rocket stages fall back into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up or land in the ocean after delivering payloads to their intended orbits. However, because the lunar lander mission in January required more thrust, the rocket’s second stage remained in space, drifting among thousands of other bits of space debris that active satellites must avoid. It wasn’t until earlier this year that astronomers tracked the stage’s trajectory, concluding it was on a path ending at the Moon.
According to Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX’s director of NASA science, Dragon programs, “Solar activity and gravitational forces have nudged it toward the Moon.” Bill Gray, an astronomer who developed widely used planetary software and wrote a report on the impact, noted that while the event might offer some minor scientific insights, it highlights issues with how space debris is disposed of. Gray added, “It doesn’t pose any danger to anyone, but it does underscore a certain recklessness in how leftover space hardware is handled.”
Impacts of space debris on the Moon are rare. For example, a Chinese rocket stage crashed into the lunar surface in March 2022 after a lunar test mission. NASA intentionally crashed a rocket stage into the Moon in 2009 to study the resulting lunar dust plume. Recent attempts to land softly on the Moon have sometimes resulted in crashes: Russia’s Luna-25 mission went out of control and crashed in 2023, leaving its small plutonium-238 power source likely safely on the lunar surface; India’s Chandrayaan-2 lander malfunctioned and crashed in 2019; and Israel’s Beresheet lander also crashed that same year. Some of these missions carried tiny tardigrades—micro-animals known for surviving radiation and extreme environments—potentially still present on the lunar surface.
NASA has previously conducted controlled crashes of Saturn V stages in the 1970s to study seismic effects. The agency and SpaceX are also exploring ways to prevent future debris impacts on the Moon. NASA’s Artemis program plans to establish a lunar base and conduct routine crewed missions later this decade, emphasizing the need to avoid damage from space debris.