SpaceX rocket set to crash into moon Wednesday in rare observable impact

A piece of SpaceX hardware that has been drifting through space for more than a year is about to collide with the moon. On Wednesday, the rocket's upper stage—a cylindrical object roughly 40 feet long and weighing around 10,000 pounds—will slam into the lunar surface near Einstein Crater at 5,400 miles per hour, seven times the speed of sound. The impact will carve out a crater and send a plume of dust and rubble streaming across the lunar landscape, and scientists are watching closely.

The rocket launched on January 15, 2025, carrying two private lunar landers toward the moon. One of them, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, achieved what no private spacecraft had managed before: a fully successful landing on the lunar surface. The other lander, built by Japan-based ispace, did not survive the attempt. Once their payloads were delivered, the rocket's upper stage was left to its own trajectory, eventually entering an orbit that would bring it back to the moon.

Space tracking expert Bill Gray, who has been monitoring the rocket's path, predicts the collision will occur in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. The eastern portions of the United States and Canada, along with much of South America, will have the best vantage points to observe what happens. The impact itself—the flash of light as the rocket strikes—will likely be too faint to see with the naked eye, lasting less than a second. But the debris ejected from the impact site could stretch for several miles into space and remain visible through telescopes for tens of minutes afterward.

Benjamin Fernando, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, expects the collision to create a crater nearly 90 feet across and 16 feet deep—too small to see from Earth, but large enough that spacecraft orbiting the moon will be able to photograph it. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter are both positioned to capture before-and-after images of the crash site. Danuri will pass within a mile or two of the rocket just two minutes before impact, giving scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study what happens when a tracked, well-documented object strikes the moon.

The crash was never intentional. Space experts say the collision could have been prevented if the upper stage had been nudged into orbit around the sun instead of left on a lunar intercept course. This will be only the second known instance of a dead rocket accidentally hitting the moon. In 2022, a Chinese rocket segment created a pair of craters on the lunar far side. The SpaceX impact, occurring on the near side of the moon, will release energy equivalent to three tons of TNT.

What makes this event valuable to scientists is not the accident itself, but what it reveals about debris impacts in an era when the moon is becoming crowded with human activity. The moon's low gravity and absence of wind mean that dust and rubble from impacts will linger in place, potentially hazardous to future astronauts and equipment. "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," Fernando wrote. During the Apollo era, NASA deliberately crashed rocket sections and lunar modules into the moon to measure seismic activity. In 2009, NASA intentionally struck the moon with its LCROSS spacecraft in search of ice near the south pole. But those were controlled experiments. This collision offers scientists a chance to study the real-world consequences of untracked debris in a way that matters increasingly as activity on the moon accelerates.

The United States and China are both racing to land astronauts on the moon within the next few years. SpaceX and Blue Origin are competing to build the lander that will carry NASA's Artemis IV astronauts to the lunar surface, following in the footsteps of the 12 Apollo astronauts who walked there decades ago. As more robots and humans arrive on the moon, the need to monitor and manage debris becomes urgent. "Things are getting crowded up there," Gray observed. The SpaceX rocket's unintended collision, visible to observers across much of the Western Hemisphere, will offer a rare glimpse into a problem that space agencies are only beginning to grapple with.