Drifting SpaceX rocket heading for accidental collision with moon
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- SpaceX rocket upper stage, launched more than a year ago with a pair of lunar landers, will unintentionally slam into the moon on Wednesday near Einstein Crater at roughly 5,400 mph (8,700 km/h) — about seven times the speed of sound.
- Space tracking expert Bill Gray predicted the collision and plans to observe the aftermath from New Brunswick, Canada, warning that "Things are getting crowded up there" as orbital debris accumulates.
- The near-side impact will pack energy equivalent to three tons of TNT, and Los Alamos National Laboratory's Benjamin Fernando expects it to carve a crater roughly 90 feet across and 16 feet deep — too small to see from Earth but visible to spacecraft.
- The impact flash will likely be too dim for Earth observers, but because the moon has low gravity and no atmosphere, the ejected plume of dust and rubble could stretch for miles and remain visible to telescopes for tens of minutes.
- This is only the second known accidental rocket collision with the moon, after a Chinese rocket segment struck the lunar far side in 2022 and carved out a pair of craters.
- NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter will capture before-and-after images of the crash site, while Fernando is rallying both professional and amateur observers.
- Space experts noted the crash could have been avoided if the upper stage had been nudged into a heliocentric (sun-orbiting) trajectory after completing its mission.
Why it matters: With only one prior accidental lunar rocket impact on record, Wednesday's near-side collision gives scientists a rare chance to study a fresh, instrumented crater event — using NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea's Danuri to measure exactly what a 5,400 mph strike packing three tons of TNT-equivalent energy does to lunar regolith, data that directly informs how dangerous debris impacts will be for future crewed missions.
