Falcon 9 upper stage (2025-010D)

SpaceX (US) · Rocket debris · 2026Debris impact

Hit the Moon on Aug 5, 2026 near Einstein crater on the western limb: the spent second stage from the Falcon 9 that launched Blue Ghost 1 and Resilience in Jan 2025. Unintentional. No measured impact position, time, or crater size has been published (as of Aug 9, 2026).

On 5 August 2026 a discarded SpaceX upper stage hit the Moon, and nearly every precise number you will read about it is a prediction rather than a measurement. The object is 2025-010D, the second stage of the Falcon 9 that launched two commercial landers in January 2025. It finished its job that day; solar activity and gravity spent the next nineteen months bending its orbit until it intersected the Moon. Nobody aimed it, nobody watched it land, and as of 9 August 2026 nobody has published where it actually struck.

Facts as of August 9, 2026, from the sources listed below.

2.43km/s

predicted impact speed, about 5,400 mph

19months

between finishing its mission and hitting the Moon

1,053

tracking observations used to predict the impact

The launch that put it there: Blue Ghost Mission 1 leaving Kennedy Space Center on 15 January 2025. Credit: NASA/Frank Michaux.

Commonly wrong. Two things. First, that a Starlink satellite crashed into the Moon: none was involved. Starlink satellites orbit roughly 550 km up and have no way to reach the Moon, 384,400 km away. The object was a spent rocket stage, and the word Starlink appears nowhere in NASA's release, the tracking analysis, or the scientific papers. Second, that there is video of the impact: there is not. The clip that spread was traced to a post from April 2026, months before the impact happened, and fact-checkers found it inauthentic.

01Mission facts

What it was	The Falcon 9 second stage from the Jan 15, 2025 launch of Firefly's Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace's HAKUTO-R Mission 2 (Resilience), catalogued as COSPAR 2025-010D. Backward propagation of its orbit independently ties it to that launch.
The launch	Jan 15, 2025, 1:11 a.m. EST from Launch Complex 39A, Kennedy Space Center. Both landers were delivered successfully to their trans-lunar trajectories.
Impact date	Aug 5, 2026. The impact is confirmed to have happened, but no measured time exists: Bill Gray predicted 06:35:37.5 UTC and Campbell et al. predicted 06:33:23 UTC plus or minus 55 seconds. Every time in circulation traces back to one of those predictions.
Where it hit	Predicted at 19.461 N, 93.293 W (266.707 E), near the 181 km crater Einstein on the western limb. Gray's own caveat: trust it to "a few seconds and a few kilometers", not the formal precision, because solar radiation pressure on a tumbling stage cannot be modelled well. No measured position has been published.
Near side or far side	Genuinely unsettled. At roughly 93 to 94 degrees west the point sits essentially on the western limb. Gray places it on the near side; Campbell et al. and Korean coverage call it the far side; NASA says only "near the Einstein and Bell craters".
Impact speed (predicted)	2.43 km/s, about 5,400 mph or 8,700 km/h. From the same orbital solution as the predicted position; no measured value has been published.
Mass	Not measured. Published estimates run from about 4,000 kg (Fernando et al.) to about 4,900 kg (Gray). NASA's release gives no mass, despite the figure often being attributed to it.
Why it hit the Moon	Unintentional. SpaceX passivated the stage "per the appropriate rules and regulations", but stages sent on high-energy trajectories cannot be deorbited the way low-Earth-orbit stages can. NASA attributes the return to "solar activity and gravitational forces", and calls disposal on the lunar surface a technically accepted method rather than a violation.
Was it a mission failure	No. The stage had finished boosting both landers out of Earth orbit 19 months earlier. Blue Ghost 1 went on to land successfully and operate about 14 days; ispace's Resilience failed separately during its own descent in June 2025.
Who tracked it	Bill Gray of Project Pluto identified the collision course from 1,053 astrometric observations contributed by asteroid surveys and amateur astronomers at five observatories in Mississippi, Utah, Beijing and England. NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies at JPL later confirmed the impact was certain.
Did anyone see it	No spacecraft watched the impact itself. South Korea's Danuri orbiter imaged the site eight times, once about 30 minutes before and seven times afterwards, giving the first before-and-after orbital record of a rocket body hitting the Moon. NASA's LRO was over the far side at the moment of impact.
What the images show	A dark patch centred on the impact point with radial ejecta traces, not a resolved crater. Danuri's terrain imager works at roughly 5 m per pixel, so a 20 to 30 m crater spans only a handful of pixels; KASA says the crater's size and shape are still being analysed.
Crater size	Not measured by anyone. Pre-impact predictions ranged from about 18 m across and 4 m deep (NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office) through 20 to 30 m, up to about 40 m. Figures presented as measurements are model outputs.
What happens next	NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, whose narrow-angle cameras resolved the 2022 rocket body crater, is expected to image the site, but NASA says timing depends on lighting, orbital position, and downlink, and has given no date. As of Aug 9, 2026 the LROC team had published no image of this impact.
What Korea's space agency published	KASA's own pre-impact plan gave a mass of about 4.9 tonnes, an impact speed of 2.43 km/s and a predicted crater 20 to 30 m across. Its post-impact release reports terrain change and ejecta traces near the site and states that the crater's size and shape are still being analysed. Neither release publishes coordinates.
The policy question	NASA and SpaceX say they are jointly studying how to prevent uncontrolled upper stage impacts on future high-energy missions in the Sun-Earth-Moon system.

Site: 19.4610°N, 93.2930°W · Predicted impact point near Einstein crater. Not confirmed by imagery. (source)

02Mission timeline

Jan 15, 2025
Falcon 9 lifts off from Kennedy Space Center and delivers Firefly's Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace's Resilience to trans-lunar trajectories. The second stage, its job done, is left in a high Earth orbit.
Mar 2, 2025
Blue Ghost 1 lands successfully and operates about 14 days on the surface.
Jun 5, 2025
Resilience is lost during its own descent, a separate failure unrelated to the stage.
Feb 26, 2026
1,053 tracking observations have accumulated from asteroid surveys and amateur astronomers at five observatories, enough to show the abandoned stage is on a Moon-crossing path.
Jun to Aug 2026
Bill Gray revises the predicted impact repeatedly as new tracking arrives, once moving it about 170 km. NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies confirms the impact is certain.
Aug 5, 2026
Impact, near Einstein crater on the western limb. Nothing was in position to watch it happen.
Aug 5 to 6, 2026
South Korea's Danuri images the site eight times, starting about 30 minutes before the impact: the first before-and-after orbital record of a rocket body hitting the Moon.
Aug 6, 2026
KASA publishes the images, showing terrain change and ejecta traces, and says the crater's size and shape are still being analysed.
Aug 9, 2026
Still no measured impact position, no measured impact time, and no measured crater size from any agency.

Teal dots: events that physically happened in flight or on the Moon. Grey: announcements, namings, contracts, and targets.

03The mission

The uncomfortable part of this story is not that a rocket hit the Moon. It is how little we can say about where. An impact is a single instant with a single set of coordinates, and four days later the best anyone has is a prediction computed before it happened, from a body tumbling in sunlight that pushes on it unevenly. Bill Gray, who worked out the collision course, publishes his own numbers to three decimals and then tells you not to trust them past a few kilometres.

That gap matters because coverage closes it automatically. A predicted time becomes the time. A modelled crater becomes a measured one. Within days of this impact you could read a specific crater width presented as fact, sourced to a pre-impact model, next to photographs that cannot resolve a crater at all.

What is not in doubt: a four to five tonne object that nobody was steering hit the Moon at 2.43 kilometres per second, because a stage sent on a high-energy trajectory has no way home and no way down. NASA and SpaceX now say they are studying how to stop it happening again, which is the most interesting sentence in the whole affair.

04Sources

azmth is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA, CNSA, Roscosmos, ISRO, JAXA, or any other space agency or company named on this page.

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