A spent SpaceX rocket stage is hurtling toward the moon and is expected to make an unintended, high-speed impact on Wednesday, carving out a fresh crater and sending a plume of debris into the lunar sky that scientists and amateur stargazers alike are hoping to observe. The 2026 SpaceX lunar impact was never part of the mission plan — it is the accidental consequence of a rocket upper stage left adrift after launching a pair of lunar landers more than a year ago.
Impact details: speed, location and what to expect
Space tracking expert Bill Gray has calculated the rocket stage will strike the moon at roughly 8,700 kilometres per hour — approximately seven times the speed of sound — near the moon's Einstein Crater on its sunlit western limb. The collision is forecast to release energy equivalent to three tonnes of TNT.
Because the impact will occur on the near side of the moon during the early hours, observers in eastern parts of the United States, Canada and much of South America should have the clearest vantage points. Gray himself plans to watch from New Brunswick, Canada.
The actual flash of impact, lasting less than a second, is expected to be too faint to see with the naked eye. However, the resulting stream of ejected material could stretch several kilometres into space and remain visible through telescopes for tens of minutes after the strike.
"The gravity on the moon is low and there is no wind to blow the dust away," said Benjamin Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory, who is encouraging both professional and amateur astronomers to observe the event.
The rocket and the mission behind it
The errant hardware is the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 15 January 2025, carrying two private lunar landers. The stage measures roughly 12 metres in length and weighs approximately 4,500 kilograms.
One of those landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost — made history by becoming the first private spacecraft to achieve a fully successful lunar landing. The second lander, built by Japan-based ispace, was not so fortunate, ending in a crash.
Space experts note the lunar collision could have been avoided had the upper stage been redirected into a solar orbit after completing its mission. Instead, it has been drifting in an unstable trajectory ever since. This marks the second time a dead rocket is known to have accidentally struck the moon; a Chinese rocket segment created a pair of craters on the lunar far side back in 2022.
For more on the commercial space industry's recent turbulence, see our earlier coverage of how SpaceX shares sank from their peak as market enthusiasm cooled.
What scientists hope to learn
Fernando's team anticipates the collision will gouge out a crater approximately 27 metres wide and 5 metres deep — too small to be seen from Earth but well within the detection range of orbiting spacecraft.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter are both positioned to capture before-and-after imagery of the impact site. Danuri is expected to pass within just a couple of kilometres of the rocket stage a mere two minutes before it hits.
Fernando stressed there is a broader scientific purpose to studying the crash. "Part of the reason for our interest in this event is to figure out how much of a hazard debris impacts pose to future astronauts," he said.
Researchers point out that natural meteoroid strikes on the moon offer little or no warning, making well-tracked human-made impacts like this one particularly valuable. NASA deliberately crashed rocket sections and lunar modules into the moon during the Apollo era for seismic data, and again in 2009 as part of a targeted mission. Wednesday's event, while unplanned, offers a similar scientific opportunity.
A warning about crowded space
Beyond the immediate spectacle, experts say the incident underscores a growing concern about the volume of debris accumulating in space. "Things are getting crowded up there," Gray warned — a sentiment that is increasingly shared across the global space science community as launch rates continue to climb.
