A SpaceX rocket piece that has been drifting through space since last year is on course to collide with the moon tonight, according to officials.
The object is the spent second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 that launched Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, with ispace’s Resilience lander as a secondary payload, in January 2025. Roughly the size of a school bus and weighing about four metric tons, the stage is expected to strike the lunar surface around 2:35 a.m. ET, which is 8:35 p.m. in Hawaii.
SpaceX rocket piece on course for lunar impact
Traveling at an estimated 5,400 miles per hour, the SpaceX rocket piece will kick up a plume of dust that sunlight could illuminate. Experts say the event will be difficult to see from Earth with the naked eye.
SpaceX said the impact is unintentional. The stage is projected to hit near Einstein Crater on the moon’s western limb, a region that is often hard to view from Earth.
In typical missions, upper stages either reenter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up or fall into the ocean after precisely placing their payloads in orbit. Because the January lunar mission required extra energy to push the lander toward the moon, the second stage remained in space instead of deorbiting, adding to the growing collection of space debris that operational satellites must avoid.
Astronomers concluded earlier this year that the inert stage, which had vented its remaining propellant and cannot maneuver, was on a trajectory that would end at the moon. Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX’s director of NASA science and Dragon programs, told reporters that a combination of solar activity and gravitational forces nudged it onto the lunar impact path.
Bill Gray, developer of widely used astronomy software who analyzed the prediction in April, said the event could offer minor scientific insights. He added that while the incident poses no danger, it underscores concerns about how discarded space hardware is managed.
Unplanned impacts on the moon are uncommon. A Chinese rocket stage hit the lunar surface in March 2022 following a test mission.
NASA has also conducted deliberate impacts, including a 2009 experiment to study lunar material ejected by a collision and seismic studies in the 1970s using Saturn V stages. Several recent attempts at soft landings have ended in crashes, including Russia’s Luna-25 in 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-2 in 2019, and Israel’s Beresheet that same year.
Among Beresheet’s payloads were microscopic tardigrades, organisms renowned for surviving extreme conditions, which may still be present on the surface.
Scheiman said NASA and SpaceX are discussing measures to prevent future unintended lunar impacts, particularly as NASA advances its Artemis program to establish a lunar base and send regular astronaut missions later this decade.
