The 230-ft. Falcon 9 lifted off from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 15, 2025, packed with a pair of spacecraft bound for the moon. One of them, the Blue Ghost lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, landed on the moon on March 2, 2025, becoming the first privately built ship to pull off a completely successful lunar touchdown. The other, the Resilience lander, built by the Japanese company ispace, wasn’t so fortunate, crash-landing on the moon on June 5, 2025, after its laser range-finder failed. At the beginning of their missions, once the ships had climbed to near-Earth space, both of them relied on the Falcon 9’s 45-ft. upper stage to blast them away from the Earth and outward to the moon. After releasing the two lunar landers, that Falcon stage was supposed to fall harmlessly away, but instead it’s hung around.
On April 29, 2026 astronomer Bill Gray first predicted the second stage’s lunar crack-up and the precise date and time it would happen. Gray is the author of the Project Pluto website, which relies on telescope surveys by amateur astronomers, and software he wrote to compute orbits of objects the U.S. military doesn’t track. Using this information, he was also able to forecast the precise spot the spent booster will hit the moon: near the Einstein Crater at the far western lunar horizon.
What is the history of rockets crashing into the moon?
Analyzing a temblor that resulted from a known object of a known mass striking the moon at a known speed can reveal valuable information about the structure of the lunar interior. During the near-disastrous Apollo 13 mission in 1970, commander Jim Lovell was informed of the successful impact while piloting his crippled spacecraft around the moon. “Well,” he said to the ground, “at least something worked on this flight.”
Can you see the SpaceX lunar crash from Earth?
“Let's say that rocks are blasted out at 100 meters a second (224 mph),” Gray writes on the Project Pluto site. “On the moon, if you are a rock shooting upward at that speed, you will rise for about one minute, reaching a height of three kilometers (1.9 mi.). You'll then plummet down for a minute and be returned to the moon.”
Other researchers predict a much more dramatic event. In a study appearing on the pre-publication site arxiv, computer models suggest an ejecta spike rising as high as 100 km (62 mi.) and spreading 183 km (114 mi.) laterally from the impact point.
Whatever the size of the blast, skygazers will certainly be monitoring it —and so will at least one spacecraft, NASA’s trusty Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). LRO has been circling the moon since 2009, and has returned albums of remarkable images—including overhead shots of the six Apollo landing sites. The satellite will not be in position to witness the Aug. 5 impact as it takes place, but it did pass over the site on July 29 and will be over it again on Aug. 12. Those sequential passes will allow comparison shots and measurements of the crater the rocket stage produces. Gray predicts a pit more than 50 ft. across.
Analyzing the scale of the blast and the size of the scar it leaves can yield valuable scientific data about the gravitational and geological physics of the moon. It can also address questions of future astronaut safety—just how many dozens or hundreds of miles lunar explorers will have to be from an impact site to be safe.
For now, nothing can get in the way of the inevitable hit at the appointed time. Rocket scientists have been skeet-shooting the moon for 67 years now. With both the U.S. and China aiming for crewed lunar landings before 2030 and uncrewed cargo deliveries to support them—with who knows how many more spent rocket stages tumbling out of the skies over the moon—our punchdrunk nearest neighbor is in for more poundings.
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