A SpaceX rocket crash on the Moon was expected early Wednesday, when the Falcon 9 second stage from a January 2025 lunar lander mission was due to strike at about 2:35 a.m. ET. The 4 metric tons of hardware had been drifting in space since the launch, and scientists were waiting to see whether telescopes could catch the aftermath.
Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX director of NASA science and Dragon programs, said on Monday: "What has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path toward the moon." The stage was travelling at 5,400 miles per hour, or 8,690 kph, when it was expected to hit Einstein Crater on the moon’s western limb.
Bill Gray Reported April Impact Path
Bill Gray, creator of widely used astronomy software, published a report in April saying the stage was on course for the moon. He said after that report: "This may be of some — probably minor — scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it" and "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."
The object was the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched a lunar lander from Firefly Aerospace toward the moon in January 2025. Because that mission needed more thrust than missions closer to Earth, the stage stayed in space after it dumped its remaining fuel and could not be controlled.
Moon Impact Rarely Seen
Space junk impacts on the moon are rare. NASA intentionally crashed a rocket stage into the moon in 2009 to study the plume of lunar material kicked up by the impact, and it also intentionally crashed stages from its Saturn V moon rocket into the moon in the 1970s to study seismic effects. A Chinese rocket stage crashed into the moon in March 2022 after a lunar test mission, and 2023 Luna-25 crash, 2019 Chandrayaan-2 crash, and 2019 Beresheet crash are among the other named lunar impacts in the record.
The expected strike was unlikely to be confirmed for at least several hours, because no spacecraft orbiting the moon were expected to be in position to image it live. Scientists were expected to study telescope images afterward to see whether the impact occurred, while SpaceX and NASA discuss ways to prevent future lunar impacts as the U.S. space agency plans a lunar base and routine astronaut missions to the lunar surface.
For observers on Earth and in the Americas, the practical limit is simple: the stage was expected to hit where direct viewing is difficult, so the first usable readout would come from image analysis rather than a live view. If those images show the plume or fresh marks at Einstein Crater, the collision will have shifted from an expected event to a studied one.
