SpaceX rocket thought to have crashed into the moon in unintentional collision — SkimNews
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- SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage is believed to have struck the moon at approximately 6:35am BST on Wednesday at 5,400 mph (8,690 km/h), after floating in space since launching two commercial lunar landers in January 2025.
- NASA expects the impact to gouge a crater about 60ft (18m) wide and 12ft (4m) deep and plans to position US and South Korean lunar satellites to photograph the site, though data may take days to arrive.
- Bill Gray, creator of widely used astronomy software, identified the rocket's lunar collision course and published a report in April; he said the event "highlight[s] a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware is disposed of."
- The rocket stage required more thrust than typical Earth-orbit missions to deliver its lunar payload, so unlike most discarded stages that burn up in Earth's atmosphere, it remained in space and could not be steered after dumping its remaining fuel.
- The January 2025 mission carried two landers: Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, which achieved a soft landing on the moon's northeastern near side, and Japanese company ispace's 2-metre lander, which crashed on final descent.
- SpaceX director Julianna Scheiman said NASA and SpaceX are discussing ways to prevent future lunar impacts, framing the cause as a combination of solar activity and gravity forces acting on the uncontrolled stage.
- The article notes human-made lunar impacts remain rare — a Chinese rocket stage hit the moon in March 2022, and NASA intentionally crashed a stage into the surface in 2009 to study ejected material.
- Professional and amateur astronomers using high-quality telescopes were unable to visually confirm the impact on Wednesday, possibly because the site was near the moon's visible edges.
Why it matters: The crash turns a piece of space junk into an involuntary lunar science experiment, with NASA using US and South Korean satellites to study the resulting 60-foot crater. The incident underscores the growing debris problem as commercial lunar missions multiply: because the stage needed extra thrust for its 2025 payload, it bypassed the usual atmospheric burn-up and ended up on an uncontrolled path to the moon.
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