A SpaceX rocket will crash into the moon on Wednesday. It’s a symptom of something much worse

The upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket is now zooming through space at 5,400 mph on a direct collision course with the moon. It will leave a small crater and a plume of lunar debris near Einstein Crater, on the sunlit western limb of the moon. You may think that’s fine. It is not, not really. The moon is not Manhattan, sure, but that doesn’t make this any less concerning.

The problem is that this will continue to happen until it gets dangerous to humans. According to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, “This impact will not be a problem. But in a future where there are long-term bases on the moon, similar impacts would be an issue and we need not to leave rocket stages in chaotic orbits of this kind.”

Unless we stop SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other space organizations in the U.S. and China from recklessly using space, we will keep hearing these stories until something really bad happens. These companies must design their mission plans to dispose of any trash in a safe way, now and forever.

The new race to the moon will continue to increase its pace throughout the twenty-first century. The United States and China are competing to put bases and mine operations on the lunar surface within the next several years. Robot fleets and astronaut crews will be roaming the moon, and billions of dollars will be spent on the regolith in search of riches. Keeping humans—and all that expensive infrastructure—safe will depend on a predictable orbital environment.

Path to collision

The upper stage of a Falcon 9 is a cylinder that stretches 45 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter. It lifted off on January 15, 2025, from Launch Complex 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, carrying two privately built lunar landers: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which completed the first fully successful lunar touchdown ever achieved by a private spacecraft, and ispace’s Resilience, which was destroyed during its landing attempt. Being expendable—meaning it was not designed to return to Earth like the space shuttle and concepts like Aspire Space Technologies’ Oryx—the stage never returned to Earth after deploying its payloads. It remained in a highly elliptical orbit that periodically carried it beyond the distance of the Moon’s orbit.

While hitting the Moon was never part of SpaceX’s plan, subtle forces including solar radiation pressure gradually reshaped its path over the months following its launch. That eventually pushed it into its current collision trajectory.

“The orbit of the Moon and of this object, roughly speaking, intersect,” explains space tracking expert Bill Gray, who computed the impact prediction. “Usually, one goes through the intersection point while the other is someplace else. But on August 5, they’ll reach that point at the same time.”

That moment arrives August 5 during the early morning hours, within a few minutes of 2:35 AM U.S. Eastern Daylight Time. Because the Moon has no atmosphere, the stage is expected to reach the lunar surface intact rather than breaking apart. It will strike at an estimated 5,400 mph, a velocity equivalent to seven times the speed of sound at an angle of 34 degrees from the vertical, matching the force of the detonation of three tons of TNT and making a crater about 90 feet across and 16 feet deep. The crater will be too small to be resolved by telescopes on Earth, though spacecraft orbiting the Moon—like NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter—will be able to image it.

While the flash produced by the collision is expected to persist for under one second and will most likely be too faint for direct visual detection, the ejecta plume will linger. This lunar material—thrown upward by the force of the impact—could travel several miles into space and stay detectable through telescopes for tens of minutes. “The gravity on the moon is low and there is no wind to blow the dust away,” says Benjamin Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

All of this could have been avoided had the stage been designed with enough fuel to redirect itself into an orbit around the Sun instead of leaving it in a chaotic orbit around Earth. Reserving that fuel would have made the mission heavier and more expensive—the same trade-off that leads operators to abandon most upper stages in orbit. The logic is that space is so big that leaving trash behind doesn’t matter, so let’s take the profit instead of taking care of our junk. But this moon crash shows that’s not actually a sound strategy.

Houston, we’ll have a problem

NASA has deliberately crashed hardware into the moon before. Rocket sections and lunar modules were sent down during the Apollo era to generate seismic measurements. In 2009, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft and its upper stage were intentionally driven into the surface to hunt for ice close to the lunar south pole.

But this impact is unplanned. It will be the second documented case of a defunct rocket body striking the moon by accident. The first occurred in 2022, when a Chinese rocket segment carved out a pair of craters on the lunar far side.

The disregard for what this impact means is jarring, especially when you consider that space is public. It belongs to all of us, but organizations keep treating it as private real estate in the name of profit. SpaceX has already filled low Earth orbit with thousands of Starlink satellites that are falling at an increasingly alarming rate, vaporizing into metallic dust in the atmosphere we all breathe.

Then there’s SpaceX’s insane IPO, which was largely premised on Musk’s promise for a constellation of thousands of AI data centers in orbit that will further contribute to atmospheric pollution and, according to McDowell, dramatically increase the possibility of a Kessler syndrome, the theoretical scenario popularized by the movie Gravity in which a cascade of accidental collisions can render entire orbits useless.

You can argue that the risk of overpopulating orbits and increasing launches are worth taking in the name of progress, sure. Even necessary for our future as a spacefaring civilization. But none of these organizations can justify leaving their junk behind just because it is more expensive not to do so. That’s why traffic control and controlled deorbiting measures must be strengthened before the fleets and crews begin arriving on the moon. The moon, like Earth’s orbit, like its atmosphere, like space itself, does not belong to SpaceX or to any flag. It belongs to all of us. The least we can demand is that those who profit from it stop leaving bullets in our sky.