A SpaceX Rocket Will Crash Into the Moon This Week. Here's Everything You Need to Know
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A SpaceX Rocket Is About to Crash Into the Moon. Here's Everything You Need to Know
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Editor at Large
Aug 4, 2026 10:00 AM UTC
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience lunar landers, lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 15, 2025.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience lunar landers, lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 15, 2025.GREGG NEWTON/AFP —Getty Images
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Editor at Large
Aug 4, 2026 10:00 AM UTC
Humanity has been putting metal on the moon ever since Sept. 13, 1959, when the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 spacecraft completed a 36-hour translunar journey, performing a planned crash landing between the Sea of Rains and the Sea of Serenity on the moon’s near side. Since then, nearly 70 spacecraft and spent boosters have soft landed or crash landed on the moon—including six ships carrying people. This week one more big hunk of hardware is set to join them: the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, on track for an unplanned lunar impact on Wednesday, Aug. 5, at 2:35 a.m. ET, after a 19-month journey.
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.
Why is the SpaceX rocket booster crashing into the moon?
Typically, a Falcon 9’s second stage used for a deep space mission would enter a highly elliptical orbit of the Earth and ultimately be brought down by atmospheric drag for a fiery reentry. But for reasons not quite clear, this stage managed to avoid the atmosphere on its closer approaches to Earth, and persist in an orbit that brought it nearer and nearer the moon.
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?
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This is not the first time a spent rocket stage will strike the lunar surface. During the Apollo landings in the 1960s and 1970s, the empty third stage of the Saturn V rocket was deliberately targeted for a lunar impact, with the goal of setting off small moonquakes that could be detected by the seismographs left by earlier landing missions.
Analyzing a temblor that resulted from a known object of a known mass striking the moon at a known speed can reveal...