Discarded SpaceX Rocket Set to Strike the Moon at 5,400 mph Wednesday

A spent SpaceX upper stage is on a collision course with the moon, set to strike the lunar surface Wednesday at 5,400 mph — roughly seven times the speed of sound — in an unintentional impact that scientists say will yield rare data on space debris hazards.

Space tracking expert Bill Gray predicts the rocket will slam into the moon near Einstein Crater on the sunlit western limb, releasing energy equivalent to three tons of TNT and carving out a crater nearly 90 feet across and 16 feet deep, according to Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher Benjamin Fernando.

The impact flash itself will last less than a second and is expected to be too dim for the naked eye. However, the resulting plume of ejected material could stretch several miles into space and remain visible to telescopes for tens of minutes, Fernando said.

The abandoned upper stage — approximately 40 feet long and weighing around 10,000 pounds — originally launched two private lunar landers on January 15, 2025. One of those payloads, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, became the first private spacecraft to complete a fully successful lunar landing. The other, built by Japan-based ispace, wrecked on descent.

It was never SpaceX's intent to hit the moon. Space experts said the crash could have been avoided had the upper stage been nudged into orbit around the sun after its mission concluded.

The event will be the second known instance of a dead rocket striking the moon accidentally. A Chinese rocket segment created a pair of craters on the lunar far side in 2022.

Observers in the eastern portions of the United States and Canada, as well as much of South America, are expected to have the best views of the aftermath. Gray, who operates a space-tracking service, plans to watch from New Brunswick, Canada.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter are both positioned to capture before-and-after imagery of the impact site. Danuri is projected to pass within a mile or two of the rocket segment just two minutes before impact, according to Fernando's team.

Fernando said part of the scientific interest centers on assessing risks to future crewed missions. "Part of the reason for our interest in this event is to figure out how much of a hazard debris impacts pose to future astronauts," he said.

The event echoes deliberate precedents from the Apollo era, when NASA intentionally drove rocket segments and lunar modules into the moon for seismic research. In 2009, the agency crashed its LCROSS spacecraft near the lunar south pole in search of water ice.

The upcoming impact arrives as the United States and China are both pressing forward with plans to land astronauts on the moon within the next few years. SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are competing to provide the lander for NASA's Artemis IV mission.

Retired astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell drew a distinction between the immediate event and the longer-term implications. "This impact will not be a problem," he said. "But in a future where there are long-term bases on the moon, similar impacts would be an issue and we need not to leave rocket stages in chaotic orbits of this kind."

Gray put it more plainly: "Things are getting crowded up there." Scientists broadly agree that Wednesday's event — however contained — underscores the need for improved debris monitoring and lunar traffic management before sustained human activity on the moon begins in earnest.