SpaceX rocket set to crash into moon at 5,400 mph Wednesday

A SpaceX rocket upper stage is about to become an unintended piece of lunar history. On Wednesday, the discarded booster—a 40-foot-long, 10,000-pound hunk of metal that launched two private lunar landers more than a year ago—will slam into the moon at 5,400 miles per hour, seven times the speed of sound. Space tracking expert Bill Gray has calculated the impact will occur near Einstein Crater on the moon's western edge, visible to observers in the eastern United States, Canada, and much of South America during the early morning hours.

The collision was never part of SpaceX's plan. The upper stage was supposed to be nudged into orbit around the sun after its job was done, but it drifted instead into the moon's gravitational pull. Now, rather than trying to prevent the inevitable, scientists are preparing to study it. The impact will release energy equivalent to three tons of TNT, carving out a crater roughly 90 feet across and 16 feet deep—too small to see from Earth with the naked eye, but clearly visible to spacecraft orbiting overhead. A plume of dust and ejected material could stretch several miles into space and remain visible through telescopes for tens of minutes.

This will be only the second known accidental rocket crash on the moon. A Chinese rocket segment struck the lunar far side in 2022, creating two craters. But this SpaceX impact has a crucial advantage for researchers: it will happen on the near side, where NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter can capture detailed before-and-after photographs. Danuri will actually pass within a mile or two of the rocket just two minutes before impact, according to Benjamin Fernando at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The timing matters because the moon is becoming crowded. The rocket that will crash on Wednesday launched two private lunar landers on January 15, 2025. One of them—Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost—became the first private spacecraft to achieve a fully successful lunar landing. The other, built by Japan-based ispace, crashed. These missions represent the vanguard of a new era: the United States and China are racing to land astronauts on the moon within the next few years, while SpaceX and Blue Origin compete to build the landers that will carry NASA's next moonwalkers.

Fernando and his colleagues are eager to observe the crash not out of idle curiosity, but because it offers a rare opportunity to study how impacts behave on the lunar surface. "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 explained. The moon's low gravity and airless environment mean that dust and rubble won't settle quickly—they'll hang in space far longer than they would on Earth. Understanding this behavior is essential before humans establish permanent bases there.

The broader concern is orbital congestion. "Things are getting crowded up there," Gray noted, and he's not exaggerating. As more nations and private companies launch spacecraft toward the moon, the risk of collisions and uncontrolled debris multiplies. NASA itself contributed to this knowledge base decades ago, deliberately crashing rocket sections and lunar modules into the moon during the Apollo era to measure seismic activity. In 2009, the space agency intentionally struck the moon with its LCROSS spacecraft in search of subsurface ice near the south pole.

Retired astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell put the immediate risk in perspective: "This impact will not be a problem." But he added a crucial caveat. In a future where astronauts and robots work on the lunar surface for extended periods, similar uncontrolled impacts could pose real dangers. The solution requires better debris monitoring and traffic control systems—infrastructure that doesn't yet exist. As the moon transforms from a destination into a destination with infrastructure, the stakes of leaving rocket stages in chaotic orbits become impossible to ignore.