A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is due to crash into the moon in August
A Falcon 9 rocket is due to slam into the moon Aug. 5 at 5,400 mph after orbiting high above Earth for more than a year.
Part of a Space X rocket will crash into the moon early Wednesday, Aug. 5, creating a new crater in a collision potentially seen from Earth with a telescope.
The upper-stage of a Falcon 9 rocket is expected to impact the moon at about 2:35 a.m. ET on Aug. 5, near the Einstein crater, according to researchers. The impact and resulting plume may be visible to astronomers in parts of North and South America, according to one of a pair of recent studies looking into the event.
“Because the timing, location, and speed of the crash are known in advance, this event is a rare opportunity to learn about impact physics, the properties of lunar soil, planetary protection, and the safety of future operations on the lunar surface,” according to a study co-authored by William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin. A pre-print version of the study is available on the arXiv research-sharing platform.
This particular SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket had carried two commercial lunar landers into space back in January 2025: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and the ispace Hakuto-R Resilience lander. While the Blue Ghost made a successful landing, the Resilience lander did not.
Since then, a portion of the Falcon 9 rocket has been stuck in a highly elliptical orbit in space around Earth.
How do we know a SpaceX rocket will crash into the moon?
The rocket’s projected impact into the moon’s near side – the side permanently facing Earth – was predicted by Bill Gray, an astronomer who writes the widely used Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects like asteroids, comets and human-made spacecraft. Gray’s analysis was based on ground observations from telescopes and surveys of the orbit of the object, which was been designated 2025-010D.
Because the moon has no atmosphere, the hardware won’t burn up before impacting the lunar surface.
What part of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will make lunar impact?
Just the 45-foot upper stage or second-stage of the rocket. The first-stage (or lower-stage) that used nine Merlin-class engines to provide the initial burst of thrust at liftoff would have separated much earlier in the flight and returned to Earth for a controlled landing to be recovered, refurbished and reused by SpaceX for future launches.
While most Falcon 9 upper-stages eventually reenter Earth’s atmosphere, this particular one was so far away that it appears to have instead gotten stuck in a sort of orbital limbo.
When will the Falcon 9 rocket hit the moon?
The 8,800-pound Falcon 9 upper-stage is projected to crash into the moon within a few minutes of 2:35 a.m. ET Wednesday, Aug. 5 near a feature known as the Einstein crater, Gray wrote on the Project Pluto site.
How fast will the rocket be traveling?
The object will be traveling at about 2.43 km a second, or 5,400 mph, when it strikes the moon, according to Gray’s analysis.
Its impact is expected to create a crater of 20-30 meters in diameter (nearly 100 feet) and a double crater could result if the rocket breaks apart at impact, according to another study, also on the ArXiv site, co-authored by Gray and other researchers including Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Can I see the rocket crash into the moon?
The impact is expected to be close to the edge of the moon, as seen from earth, Gray notes. That will make it harder for amateur astronomers to view. “Maybe we’ll see the flash. Maybe we’ll see rocks ejected from the crater. Maybe we’ll even see both,” he wrote.
However, the plume created by the impact could be as much as 60 miles high and may be visible by advanced amateur astronomers, according to Space.com.
Those with at least a 4-inch telescope could give it a try, as there “will be an observing campaign involving professional and amateur astronomers from around the world,” Fernando told the website Live Science.
Mike Snider is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him at mikegsnider & @mikegsnider.bsky.social & @mikesnider & msnider@usatoday.com.