SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Upper Stage to Crash into the Moon This August
The upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, left in space after the Blue Ghost mission, is expected to impact the Moon near the Einstein Crater on August 5. The event will be observable from Earth using telescopes.
Astronomers are preparing to observe a rare event: on August 5 at 2:35 AM ET, the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is predicted to crash into the Moon near the Einstein Crater. The forecast was made by Bill Gray, creator of the Project Pluto desktop planetarium program, who fed data into his software to calculate the rocket's orbit and future path.
The upper stage originated from SpaceX's Firefly Blue Ghost mission, launched on January 15, 2025. During that flight, the Falcon 9 carried Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander and Japan's ispace Hakuto-R lander into space. After deploying both landers, the upper stage ran out of fuel and could not return to Earth, so it has been drifting in space ever since.
The stage is roughly 39 feet long and 13 feet wide, weighing about 4,000 kilograms. It will slam into the Moon at a speed of 5,400 mph. According to a paper by Gray and his colleagues, who used a physics simulator, the impact will not be significant because the stage is a hollow shell and moves much more slowly than natural lunar impactors.
Nevertheless, this event offers astronomers a chance to observe an artificial impact in real time. They can study how dust and plume move from impact events on the Moon, as well as investigate hazards of artificial space debris impacts. The impact will be most visible from locations in complete darkness at the time of the event, meaning South America and low-to-mid latitude North America. The higher the Moon at impact, the better the visibility, so astronomers in North America away from the West Coast are most likely to witness it.
