SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage unintentionally slams into Moon, carving 60-foot crater

A four-ton Falcon 9 upper stage, jettisoned during a January 2025 mission that delivered Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Hakuto-R landers, impacted the Moon near Einstein Crater early Wednesday, exploding with energy comparable to three tonnes of TNT. The collision produced a flash visible from Earth and created a crater roughly 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep, though some estimates suggest up to 100 feet. ESO’s Very Large Telescope captured a plume of lunar dust displaying sodium and lithium spectral lines for several minutes, indicating material from both the regolith and the rocket stage.

NASA, its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and South Korea’s Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter plan to photograph the site, while SpaceX attributed the trajectory to solar activity and gravity, calling it unpreventable. Astronomers note the incident underscores growing concerns about how spent hardware is managed in lunar orbit, a topic previously addressed only by deliberate impacts in the Apollo era and a 2022 Chinese rocket fragment.