IT·Science News

A leftover SpaceX rocket stage hits the Moon at 8,690 km/h, and telescopes barely see it

A four-tonne piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket crashed into the Moon early on Wednesday 5 August at about 5,400mph (8,690km/h), The Guardian reports. The upper stage had launched two commercial lunar landers, one from the US and one from Japan, in January 2025, and stayed in space instead of falling back to Earth. NASA expected a crater about 18 metres wide and 4 metres deep. Astronomers watching through telescopes could not confirm the impact on the day, possibly because it was close to the Moon’s visible edge.

Al Jazeera, citing AP and Reuters, said the stage struck near the Einstein Crater with the force of roughly three tonnes of TNT, after the pull of the Sun, Earth and Moon slowly changed its path over 18 months. US and South Korean lunar orbiters are to photograph the site.

“It doesn’t present any immediate danger, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware is disposed of.” — Bill Gray, space tracking expert, via Al Jazeera

How each outlet framed it

• The Guardian — space junk and science: NASA plans to use the event to refine techniques for tracking objects, and the paper listed past crashes, from Soviet and US probes to India’s Chandrayaan-2 lander.
• Al Jazeera — the rarity: only the second known accidental crash of discarded rocket debris on the Moon, after a Chinese Long March 3C stage in March 2022.

Where the numbers differ: The Guardian compared the stage to a five-storey building, Al Jazeera to a school bus.

What happened next: the next day The Guardian reported that the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile picked up sodium and lithium gas in a plume a few tens of kilometres across. Astrophysicist Sara Webb estimated a crater of about 20 metres by 5 metres, a little larger than NASA’s forecast.