A spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage is on course to crash into the moon on Aug. 5, 2026, according to Bill Gray, an independent astronomer and developer of the Project Pluto orbital tracking software.
Gray estimates the impact will happen around 06:44 UTC, close to Einstein crater, which sits between the near and far sides of the moon. At that moment, the stage should be traveling at about 8,700 kilometers per hour, or roughly seven times the speed of sound.
The rocket stage, catalogued as 2025-010D, is the upper half of the Falcon 9 that launched on Jan. 15, 2025, carrying two moon landers: Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 2. After propelling both landers toward the moon, the upper stage remained in an elongated orbit around Earth rather than falling back into the atmosphere or escaping into orbit around the sun. Each loop around Earth takes the stage roughly 26 days to complete, with the trajectory carrying it as close as about 220,000 kilometers to our planet and as far out as roughly 510,000 kilometers — a wide ellipse that crosses through the region where the moon travels.
"The orbit of the Moon and of this object, roughly speaking, intersect," Gray said on Project Pluto. "On August 5, they'll reach that point at the same time."
Standing as tall as a five-story building, the upper stage is among the larger pieces of hardware to strike the lunar surface in recent decades. Because it is a known Falcon 9 component, Gray said its dimensions and mass are well understood, which helps narrow predictions about the crater it will leave. Based on a comparable 2022 lunar impact — believed to be a Chinese Chang'e-5 T1 booster — the crater is expected to measure roughly 16 to 18 meters across. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter may eventually image it.
People on Earth probably won't be able to see the impact. Gray pointed out that when NASA crashed a rocket stage into the moon in 2009, there was no visible flash, even with large telescopes. This time, the impact will hit a sunlit area, making any flash even harder to spot.
While dismissing any safety risk, Gray pointed to the incident as evidence that the space industry has been careless about what happens to spent upper stages after their missions end. One partial remedy, he suggested, would be routing moon-bound stages into heliocentric orbits so they drift away from the Earth-moon system entirely — a measure that is impractical, however, for hardware left over from launches to low Earth orbit.
"It doesn't present any danger to anyone," Gray said, "though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware is disposed of."
Predictions for the exact strike point and moment of impact will sharpen over the coming months, Gray noted, though some uncertainty will persist because the stage is tumbling as it travels, meaning the pressure sunlight exerts on it shifts constantly and cannot be precisely modeled in advance.