SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage strikes Moon near Einstein crater
A spent Falcon 9 upper stage from a 2025 lunar-lander mission crashed into the Moon on August 5.
what happened
A SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage, cataloged 2025-010D, struck the Moon near Einstein crater at 06:35 UTC on August 5, traveling at about 2.43 km/s (5,400 mph), per Forbes and orbit-tracking site Project Pluto, which put the impact mass at roughly 4,900 kg. The stage launched January 15, 2025, carrying Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace's Resilience lander to the Moon under NASA's CLPS program, then drifted in a Moon-crossing orbit for about 19 months before gravity and solar radiation pressure brought it down, per NASA and Forbes. NASA said it would attempt to observe the impact with ground telescopes and its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the resulting crater on August 11 and 12, finding it about 60 feet wide and less than 10 feet deep, per NASA.
why it matters
Forbes put cumulative human-made mass left on the Moon at around 209 tons across roughly 3,000 objects, a tally this impact adds to with no disposal or cleanup framework in place for cislunar objects. As launch providers send more commercial and CLPS missions moonward, upper stages left in Moon-crossing orbits are an emerging, currently unregulated category of debris outside the deorbit rules that govern low Earth orbit.
signal-to-noise
quick facts
- Companies
- SpaceX
- Category
- incident
- Impact
- noise
- SNR
- 4 / 5
- Event date
- 2026-08-05
- Published
- 2026-08-29 17:25 UTC