SpaceX rocket chunk crashes into the Moon, leaving deep crater
WASHINGTON —A wayward chunck of debris weighing an estimated four tons and traveling at more than 5,400 miles (8,700km) per hour crashed into the Moon early Wednesday morning, creating a new crater on the lunar surface and providing scientists a rare look at high-velocity cosmic impacts, according to tracking data,
The object, the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket launched in early 2025, struck the Moon early Wednesday near the Einstein Crater, according to orbital trajectories mapped by independent astronomers and confirmed by space-tracking agencies. It struck the lunar surface with the force of roughly three tons of TNT.
The part has been floating in space since last year. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on January 15, 2025, carrying two robotic commercial landers.
While its first stage — the booster used for liftoff — returned to Earth, its second, or upper, stage served as the in-space workhorse to propel the landers on their path to the moon and after its mission was completed, was left to drift in space.
Such rocket hardware typically re-enters Earth’s atmosphere to burn up or splash down into remote ocean zones after delivering payloads into orbit.
But over 18 months, gravitational forces exerted by the Sun, Earth, and Moon gradually altered its flight path, setting it on an inevitable collision course. SpaceX said the trajectory leading to the crash was unintentional but unpreventable, given the vehicle’s remaining fuel reserves.
Scientists said the collision posed no danger to Earth, but will create a crater with a diameter of 65 to 90 feet (20 to 30 meters) on the Moon’s surface, according to a preprint study authored by a group of scientists, including researchers at NASA.
Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX's director of NASA Science and Dragon Programs, said in a news conference Monday the company followed "the appropriate rules and regulations" for properly disposing of the Falcon 9 second stage after launching it on Jan. 15, 2025, but "what has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon."
According to NASA, independent astronomers first identified the booster's trajectory using publicly available data, and its Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California later confirmed the second stage had "a 100% chance of impacting the Moon."
The impact was tvery quick and impossible to see with the naked eye. Even observers with very large telescopes were not expected to be able to see anything, according to a study about the collision released by almost two dozen scientists.
Orbital observation craft, including NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and South Korea’s Danuri spacecraft, have adjusted their sensor suites to document the collision site. While the instantaneous flash will be obscured by daylight on the lunar surface, orbiters will survey the ejected dust plume and take high-resolution before-and-after imagery of the newly formed crater.
Space tracking expert Bill Gray told The Associated Press news agency: “It doesn’t present any immediate danger, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware is disposed of.” He added that “things are getting crowded up there.”
Wednesday’s collision marks only the second known instance of discarded rocket space debris accidentally crashing into the Moon. The first occurred on March 4, 2022, when part of a Chinese Long March 3C rocket launched in 2014 impacted the lunar far side, carving out an unusual double crater.
The Moon is regularly pelted by objects, but they are usually natural occurrences, like meteoroids. The number of artificial impacts is relatively few.
The first man-made object to hit the moon was an intentional collision launched by the Soviet Union in 1959. A couple of US-built spacecraft parts hit the moon during the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972. A Japanese robotic probe hit the moon in 1993 and a European Space Agency satellite collided with the lunar surface in 2006.
In 2009, NASA intentionally crashed the upper stage of a rocket into a permanently shadowed crater at the moon's south pole to determine if water ice existed there. The impact exposed a plume of material that might not have seen direct sunlight for billions of years. The mission confirmed the presence of water ice at the lunar south pole, one of the major reasons why countries like the United States and China want to build moon bases there.
Like that collision in 2009, in the minutes following the impact of the SpaceX rocket, a cloud of lunar dust and possibly gas/vapor was expected to be lofted above the surface.
Carl Schmidt, a planetary scientist at Boston University's Center for Space Physics, told CBS News he hopes by analyzing that data he could determine how much water ice was hidden below the surface on that part of the moon.
"Just about everyone who can point a telescope at this object is going to," Schmidt said.
