A discarded Falcon 9 upper stage is on a collision course with the Moon, and scientists say the rocket stage lunar impact is now inevitable. The spent booster — cataloged as 2025-010D and weighing approximately 4,000 kilograms — is predicted to strike the lunar surface near Einstein Crater on August 5, 2026, at around 06:35 UTC. It will be traveling at roughly 8,750 kilometers per hour (5,400 mph).
The object measures about 12 meters long and 4 meters wide. It has been drifting uncontrolled through cislunar space since January 2025, when it completed its mission boosting two robotic lunar landers toward the Moon.
Where the Stage Came From
Attribution for this object is not in dispute. The upper stage launched on January 15, 2025, carrying Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 lander and ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 2 “RESILIENCE” lander on a trans-lunar injection trajectory.
After releasing both payloads — Blue Ghost successfully soft-landed on March 2, 2025 — the second stage had no remaining propellant for a controlled disposal maneuver. It could neither target a controlled lunar landing nor execute a deorbit burn to safely reenter Earth’s atmosphere.
Instead, it has followed a highly elliptical orbit extending beyond lunar distance. Earth, Moon, and solar gravity have slowly perturbed its path into a trajectory that now terminates on the lunar surface.
This case is distinct from the misattributed 2022 lunar impact. In that incident, an object initially identified as a Falcon 9 upper stage was later determined to be a Chinese Long March 3C booster from the 2014 Chang’e 5-T1 mission. That conclusion, reached through orbital reconstruction and spectroscopic analysis, was denied by China. The August 5 impactor carries no such ambiguity: tracking data, orbital history, and catalog records all confirm it is the Falcon 9 second stage from the January 2025 Blue Ghost launch.
What the Impact Will Look Like
Because the Moon has no atmosphere, the rocket body will not burn up on approach. Researchers at Oxford and collaborating institutions have run physics simulations — detailed in a July 2026 paper covered by Phys.org — to model the collision.
The stage is a hollow metal shell, not a dense solid projectile. It will be crushed rather than deeply penetrating the regolith. Simulations suggest it will excavate a crater roughly 20 to 30 meters wide and launch a dust plume several kilometers above the lunar surface.
That ejecta cloud is what scientists most want to observe. The impact is expected to occur on the Moon’s sunlit near side, making the dust plume potentially detectable by ground-based telescopes equipped with high-speed cameras. A published planning paper on arXiv (DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2607.14625) is calling on both professional and amateur astronomers to attempt observations.
The event will not be visible to the naked eye, and even with a telescope the flash itself will be brief. Teams will need to be pre-pointed and recording at high frame rates to capture it.
No Disposal Mandate, No Plan B
The August 5 impact is not an anomaly. It is the predictable outcome of launching hardware into deep space with no end-of-life disposal requirement.
Upper stages that complete trans-lunar injection maneuvers enter chaotic, long-lived orbits in the Earth-Moon system. Without a regulatory mandate or sufficient propellant reserves, they become unmanaged debris in cislunar space. Gravity eventually delivers them to the lunar surface, back into Earth’s atmosphere, or out into solar orbit.
The FAA, which regulates U.S. commercial launch operators, withdrew a proposed rule that would have required upper stages to deorbit within five years of launch, leaving a significant policy gap for missions that send hardware beyond low Earth orbit entirely.
Meanwhile, tracking tools are improving. Ground-based lidar can now characterize rocket upper stages during reentry and in deep orbits. Resonance fluorescence lidar techniques have demonstrated this for LEO debris tracking — but improved tracking alone does not solve the disposal problem.
The 2025-010D case illustrates the gap clearly. Trackers identified the object from the moment of launch. Its impact trajectory has been known for months. There is simply no mechanism to do anything about it.
What Happens After Impact
The crater will persist indefinitely. Unlike Earth, the Moon has no erosion, weather, or geological activity to erase the scar. The 20-to-30-meter impact pit will remain visible to future orbiters and eventually human explorers.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged previous crash sites, including the deliberate 2009 LCROSS impact and the 2022 impactor whose double crater raised questions about an undisclosed Chinese payload. Scientists plan to image the August 5 site with available orbital assets after the event.
Beyond the science, the event serves as a concrete data point in the debate over cislunar debris governance. As commercial missions increasingly target the Moon, the volume of spent stages and hardware entering cislunar space will only grow. August 5 is a preview of what an unmanaged cislunar environment accumulates over time.
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Sources
- Phys.org — “When a SpaceX rocket crashes into the moon, scientists will be watching” (July 2026)
- arXiv — “Observational planning for the 2026 August 5 Falcon 9 Upper Stage lunar impact,” Fernando et al. (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2607.14625
- Project Pluto / Bill Gray — 2025-010D orbital tracking and impact prediction
- Ars Technica — “A Falcon 9 upper stage will strike the moon in August” (April 2026)
- Smithsonian Magazine — SpaceX rocket part expected to smack into the Moon, highlighting space junk problem
