MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

SpaceX rocket stage crashes into the Moon after 18 months adrift

The object, weighing around 4,000 kilograms and catalogued as 2025-010D, hit at approximately 06:35 UTC at a speed close to 2.4 kilometers per second

The upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket struck the lunar surface on Wednesday near the Einstein crater, in an unplanned impact that NASA described as safe and posing no risk to Earth or to missions operating on the Moon.

The object, weighing around 4,000 kilograms and catalogued as 2025-010D, hit at approximately 06:35 UTC at a speed close to 2.4 kilometers per second, on the eastern limb of the near side. NASA had estimated in advance that the resulting crater would measure some 18 meters across and four meters deep. Those dimensions are projections; confirmation will require subsequent orbital imaging.

The stage came from the January 15, 2025 launch that carried the Blue Ghost 1 lander, built by US company Firefly Aerospace under NASA's CLPS commercial lunar payload initiative, and Japan's ispace Resilience lander. Blue Ghost touched down successfully on March 2, 2025; Resilience crashed after communications were lost shortly before descent.

Once that mission was complete, the stage lacked the fuel to deorbit. SpaceX and other operators normally have such components burn up in Earth's atmosphere, but sending the two landers consumed nearly all the propellant, and the object was left abandoned in a high Earth orbit that crossed the Moon's. Over some eighteen months, a combination of solar activity and gravitational forces from Earth, the Moon and the Sun altered its trajectory until it was set on a collision course.

“NASA did not deliberately plan for this upper stage to impact the Moon,” an agency spokeswoman said in a video posted on the social network X. The agency added that impacting hardware onto the lunar surface is a technically accepted and safe method of end-of-life disposal, being a predictable and trackable strategy, although in this case the impact was not programmed.

Independent astronomers were the first to identify the trajectory using publicly available data. The Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory later confirmed a 100% probability of impact.

NASA said scientists are keen to study the event, because it allows analysis of crater formation with the object's mass and speed known in advance, and improves tracking of similar occurrences. The Moon, without an atmosphere and with a surface that remains stable over long periods, serves as a natural laboratory for processes occurring throughout the solar system, and has been struck steadily over its roughly 4 billion years. According to the agency, a meteoroid with energy equivalent to this stage hits the Moon about every six days. Astronauts on the Artemis II mission observed impact flashes during their lunar flyby in April.

The episode has revived discussion of debris accumulation in the lunar environment and the regulatory gap governing it, at a time of growing traffic to the Moon from both public agencies and private companies.