Spacex Falcon 9 Rocket Is Believed to Have Unintentionally Crashed Into the Moon on Wednesday at 5,400Mph, Creating a New Lunar Crater

The building-sized object, part of the rocket that launched Firefly Aerospace's lunar lander in January 2025, hit the lunar surface around 6.35am BST. The impact posed no danger to Earth, but was expected to kick up a miles-long plume of lunar dust. Nasa predicted the crash would create a crater about 60ft (18 metres) wide and 12ft (four metres) deep, and said it would look for opportunities to image the site.

Nasa spokesperson Jimi Russell said on Tuesday: "The impact poses no danger to Earth and Nasa scientists are planning to collect lunar data from the event and refine techniques for tracking objects in space. The rocket's second stage remained in space because the lunar lander mission required more thrust than missions closer to Earth, leaving it floating among space junk. Astronomers determined this year that the uncontrollable stage was on a trajectory ending at the moon.

Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX's director of Nasa science and Dragon programmes, told reporters on Monday: "What has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path toward the moon. Bill Gray, creator of astronomy software, said: This may be of some – probably minor — scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it. It doesn't present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware [space junk] is disposed of.

Space junk impacts on the moon are rare; a Chinese rocket stage crashed there in March 2022, and Nasa intentionally crashed a rocket stage in 2009. Several spacecraft have crashed in recent years, including Russia's Luna-25 in 2023, India's Chandrayaan-2 in 2019, and Israel's Beresheet lander in 2019, which carried tardigrades that may still be on the surface. Scheiman said Nasa and SpaceX were discussing ways to prevent future lunar impacts. On Tuesday SpaceX reported a smaller loss than Wall Street expected with a surge in revenue in its first quarterly report as a public company, though shares tumbled on investor skepticism.