SpaceX has finally reached the Moon, just not the way Elon Musk planned.
A discarded upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket slammed into the lunar surface early Wednesday at roughly 8,700 kilometers per hour, or 5,400 mph, ending more than a year of uncontrolled flight through space. The rocket hit at roughly seven times the speed of sound, releasing energy equivalent to about three tons of TNT and blasting a new crater into the Moon.
“Scientists are certain a wayward SpaceX rocket slammed into the moon as predicted,” the Associated Press reported, citing Boston University’s Carl Schmidt, who said he is “100% certain” that his team’s observations revealed signs of the lunar crash.
“We don’t have images of the impact,” but there’s telescope evidence, Schmidt said in an email.
Still, for all the violence of the collision, the resulting crater is too small to see from Earth with the naked eye.
Astronomers had been tracking the 14-meter-long rocket stage and predicted that it would strike near Einstein crater, close to the edge of the Moon’s Earth-facing side. The impact was expected at around 5:35 a.m. BST, with telescopes around the globe pointed at the area in hopes of catching a flash or debris plume.
NASA estimates the collision could have blasted out a crater roughly 18 meters, or about 60 feet, across and four meters deep. Other estimates have suggested the crater could span as much as 100 feet.
Researchers now have an unusual opportunity to study what happens when a large object with a known history strikes the Moon at extreme speed.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 left drifting in space
The rocket stage traces back to a SpaceX launch in January 2025 carrying commercial lunar spacecraft, including Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Hakuto-R mission.
The mission’s heavy payload required the Falcon 9 to use more of its available propellant, leaving the upper stage without enough fuel to place itself on a controlled disposal trajectory. It remained in space, eventually entering a path that put it on course for the Moon.
Astronomers spent months refining predictions about where and when the collision would occur. By late April, observations had strengthened the case that the rocket stage was headed for a lunar impact.
The irony is hard to miss. SpaceX is developing Starship as a major part of NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface. Musk has spoken about going much further, including permanent infrastructure on the Moon and factories producing AI satellites in space.
Yet a discarded Falcon 9 stage appears to have become one of SpaceX’s first pieces of hardware to physically reach the lunar surface.
Scientists were waiting for the crash
For planetary scientists, an accidental rocket collision can still produce useful data.
Hannah Sargeant, a researcher at the University of Leicester, said telescopes around the planet were pointed at the expected impact area. Lunar orbiters operated by the United States and South Korea are expected to examine the site, giving researchers a chance to compare images taken before and after the collision.
That could reveal the crater’s true dimensions and show how lunar material was thrown from the impact site.
Controlled impacts have long been used in planetary science. If researchers know an object’s mass, velocity, trajectory and impact angle, they can compare those variables against the resulting crater and debris pattern. Such observations can help scientists study the physical properties of the lunar surface.
Roberto Bugiolacchi of the Macau University of Science and Technology noted that artificial impacts on the Moon aren’t new. American, Soviet, Russian, Chinese, Indian and other missions have left spacecraft and hardware on the lunar surface over decades of exploration.
Nature has been considerably busier. The Moon has been bombarded by asteroids and other objects for billions of years.
“The moon already has about 100 million natural impact craters of the size expected to be made by this crash, so such a crash will hardly make a difference,” David Rothery of the Open University said.
The concern isn’t the size of this single crater. It is what uncontrolled spacecraft could hit in the future.
The crash raises a bigger question about lunar debris
As governments and private companies send more hardware toward the Moon, scientists are increasingly asking who should be responsible for spacecraft once their missions end.
“This may be of some — probably minor — scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it,” Bill Gray, an astronomer who created the Project Pluto software used to track near-Earth objects, and who published the report predicting the rocket part’s crash landing, wrote on his website. “It doesn’t present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.”
Meanwhile, NASA and the European Space Agency plan for spacecraft disposal before launch, including reserving fuel for controlled end-of-mission maneuvers where required. Commercial missions don’t always operate under equivalent requirements.
“It is not a good thing to be randomly sending debris into the moon,” Sargeant said. “It’s not something we should be making a habit of. What if it hit a site of special interest? What if it caused damage to the historical Apollo landers?”
That question carries more weight as lunar activity increases. NASA’s Artemis program, China’s lunar ambitions and a growing field of private missions could place far more spacecraft around and on the Moon over the coming years.
There is a big difference between intentionally crashing hardware into a selected location for research and losing control of a massive rocket stage that happens to find the Moon.
“I’d be happy with a deliberate collision into the Moon if it were done with a science aim and was set up so as to be studied to learn about the Moon’s interior or surface composition. However, this crash is accidental and reckless,” Rothery said.
For SpaceX, the episode is an unusual footnote in its lunar ambitions. For scientists, it may become something more useful: a rare chance to watch a new lunar crater form almost in real time and then examine exactly what the collision left behind.
