Dead SpaceX Rocket Set to Crash Into Moon

The stage was never meant to reach the Moon. It launched on 15 January 2025 with two commercial landers: Blue Ghost 1, from the Texas firm Firefly, and Japan's Resilience. Its work done, the spent component had no propellant left to head home or push into deep space, the New York Post reports, so gravity steered it towards the Moon. The Guardian cites experts who say the crash could have been prevented by directing the stage into orbit around the Sun; Gray has written that the episode reveals "a certain carelessness" in the disposal of leftover space hardware. It will be only the second defunct rocket known to have hit the Moon by accident, after a Chinese booster segment carved two craters on the far side in 2022.

Researchers are treating it as a rare natural experiment. Benjamin Fernando, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, estimates the new crater will be 66 to 98 feet across and roughly 16 feet deep, invisible from Earth but within reach of orbiting cameras. A separate preprint led by William Jo, a University of Texas graduate student, models a central spike of ejected material rising 47 miles or more. The flash will last under a second and, experts cited by the Guardian say, will likely be too dim to see from Earth; Jo, though, calculates an ejected plume orders of magnitude brighter than the night sky. NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and South Korea will photograph the site with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Danuri probe, helping scientists judge the hazard that falling debris poses to future astronauts.