A SpaceX Falcon 9 Upper Stage Will Hit the Moon on August 5

A piece of a SpaceX rocket that has been drifting through cislunar space for more than eighteen months is about to run out of road. On August 5, 2026 at 06:34 UTC — 2:34 a.m. Eastern — a spent Falcon 9 upper stage is predicted to strike the Moon at 2.43 kilometres per second, roughly 5,400 mph.

Where the rocket came from

The stage launched on 15 January 2025 from Kennedy Space Center, carrying two lunar landers on one rocket: Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience. Sending them Moonward took a high-energy trans-lunar injection burn, and that burn left the second stage in a long, looping orbit reaching from roughly 220,000 to 510,000 km from Earth — the same gravitational neighbourhood the Moon occupies. Stages left in that regime are nudged around by the Earth and the Moon for years until, eventually, one pass ends on the surface.

Independent orbital analyst Bill Gray, who develops the Project Pluto tracking software, identified the impending impact and raised the alarm in April. His current solution puts the impact near the crater Einstein, at about 19.5° N, 93.6° W, with an uncertainty of a few seconds in time and a few kilometres in position.

Will anyone actually see it?

This is the interesting part, and it deserves a careful answer rather than a hopeful one. Those coordinates sit right at the edge of the Moon's near side — slightly beyond 90° west, which means whether the impact point itself is turned toward Earth depends on libration, the slight monthly rocking that lets us peek a little way around the limb.

What helps is that the debris does not stay on the ground. A study posted to arXiv in July modelled the event and predicts an ejecta curtain reaching roughly 15 to 20 km in altitude and a central ejecta spike reaching 75 to 100 km, spreading some 183 km laterally. A plume that tall can clear the limb even when the impact site does not. The same work finds the plume should be several orders of magnitude brighter than the dark-sky background for the first few minutes.

In practice this is a target for telescopes, not naked eyes. Observers need genuine darkness and the Moon well placed; North America east of the West Coast has the better geometry. Both professional and amateur astronomers have been encouraged to try. Curiously, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will not be positioned to watch, though the Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter may catch something.

How big a scar will it leave?

The stage masses about 3,900 kg and measures roughly 12 by 4 metres — a hollow aluminium tube rather than a solid slug. Simulations fed with Gray's tracking data suggest a fresh crater about 20 to 30 metres across. On a surface saturated with craters from four billion years of bombardment, that is small. Its scientific value is that, uniquely, we will know the mass, speed, angle and exact moment of the impact — which makes it a rare calibration point for the models used to read every other crater.

Is this a problem?

An uncontrolled rocket stage hitting the Moon is not dangerous in any immediate sense; the Moon has absorbed vastly larger impacts throughout its history, and this one lands far from any hardware or landing site. What it does illustrate is a growing housekeeping problem. Deep-space stages are frequently abandoned in orbits nobody tracks systematically, and it took an independent analyst — not an agency — to notice this one was heading for the surface.

If you want to get a feel for what impact energy does to a surface, our asteroid impact simulator lets you vary mass and speed and see the result. You can also check the Moon's current phase and position on our Moon tracker.

Story Summary

A spent Falcon 9 upper stage from the January 2025 Blue Ghost and Resilience launch will hit the Moon near the crater Einstein on 5 August 2026 at 06:34 UTC, travelling at 2.43 km/s. The 3,900 kg stage should carve a crater roughly 20 to 30 metres wide and throw up an ejecta plume modelled to reach 75 to 100 km — potentially bright enough for telescopes to catch, though the impact site sits so close to the lunar limb that visibility depends on libration. Because the mass, speed and timing are known precisely, the event is a rare calibration opportunity for impact-cratering models.