SpaceX rocket thought to have crashed into the moon in unintentional collision
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- SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage, weighing four tonnes and launched in January 2025 carrying Firefly Aerospace's lunar lander, is believed to have crashed into the moon at 5,400mph (8,690 km/h) around 6:35am BST, with the collision posing no danger to Earth.
- NASA predicted the impact would carve a crater approximately 60ft (18 metres) wide and 12ft (4 metres) deep, with spokesperson Jimi Russell saying the agency would image the site before and after to "better understand artificial impacts and their exploration implications."
- SpaceX's Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programmes, attributed the lunar trajectory to "a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces" acting on the stage, which had dumped its remaining fuel and cannot be controlled.
- Bill Gray, creator of a widely used astronomy software who first flagged the stage's lunar trajectory in April, called the event scientifically interesting but said it highlights "a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware [space junk] is disposed of."
- Prior lunar impacts include a Chinese rocket stage in March 2022, NASA's intentional 2009 crash to study plume material, Russia's Luna-25 (2023), India's Chandrayaan-2 (2019), and Israel's Beresheet lander (2019), whose payload of microscopic tardigrades may still survive on the surface.
- SpaceX and NASA are discussing ways to prevent future unintentional lunar impacts, per Scheiman, after astronomers confirmed the stage was on an orbital trajectory ending at the moon only earlier this year.
Why it matters: The impact exposes a growing blind spot in space debris policy as more missions target the moon: unlike Earth-bound stages that burn up or splash down, lunar-mission stages lack any disposal option and remain uncontrollable in deep space until gravity decides their fate. With commercial lunar launches accelerating, even a single derelict stage can now carve a 60ft crater — and NASA is treating the event as live data for tracking deep-space hardware.
