A Piece of Space Junk Just Hit the Moon

Early Wednesday morning, August 5, at approximately 2:35 a.m. ET, the moon gained a new scar — courtesy of humanity. A spent upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket slammed into the moon near Einstein Crater at approximately 5,400 miles per hour. The collision was entirely unplanned, the result of a discarded rocket segment that had been drifting through space for over a year with nowhere left to go.

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 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. For missions heading to low-Earth orbit, SpaceX and other operators usually dispose of upper stages by allowing them to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. But this mission flew too high for that to happen, and the stage never made it back.

The Force of 15,000 Sticks of Dynamite

The rocket body — 39 feet long and 13 feet wide, weighing around 8,800 pounds — gouged a new crater into the lunar surface. Its impact released a blast equal to roughly 15,000 sticks of dynamite, or three tons of TNT. Scientists estimate the collision created a crater with a diameter of 65 to 90 feet on the Moon’s surface, according to a preprint study authored by a group of scientists, including researchers at NASA.

The crater won’t be as large as one created by a solid object such as an asteroid, because the rocket body is largely hollow — but the new crater should still be around 66 to 98 feet wide. The impact flash, lasting less than a second, was probably too dim to see, but the stream of ejected material could stretch for several miles into space and remain visible to telescopes for tens of minutes. The ejected regolith was anticipated to reach 100 kilometers above the lunar surface.

A Rare Scientific Opportunity — and a Warning

This crash gives researchers an opportunity to study how debris impacts the lunar surface — a field of study experts agree is necessary before sending humans to live on the moon long term. Scientists will likely try to gauge how much lunar dust was kicked up by the event, how far it spreads, and how long it sticks around. A Korean spacecraft attempted to capture images of the impact, and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will fly by the area a few days later.

This is only the second dead rocket known to crash into the moon accidentally. A Chinese rocket segment dug out a pair of craters on the lunar far side in 2022. But the pace of space activity is accelerating rapidly, and incidents like this one may soon stop feeling rare. While not dangerous in the traditional sense of threatening satellites or space assets closer to Earth, the impact brought renewed attention to space law and space archaeology.

The Bigger Picture for Lunar Exploration

Researchers noted that the maximum ballistic range of particles ejected by such an impact is “slightly under 1,000 km — far enough to be significant from the perspective of presenting a hazard to future astronauts or infrastructure across much of the lunar surface.” That’s not a theoretical concern. With NASA’s Artemis program pushing toward a sustained human presence on the moon, the question of what happens to spent rocket hardware is no longer academic.

As more missions head for the moon — which does not have a protective atmosphere like Earth’s — managing the accumulation of space debris in lunar orbit will increasingly become an issue. SpaceX says it’s working on better ways to handle spent rocket segments from high-orbit launches — a key step if plans for a lunar colony are ever to be realized. Wednesday’s impact was an accident. The next one might be harder to excuse.