Castaway SpaceX rocket stage crashed into moon: Scientists

Scientific observers had deemed the 8,690kmh crash inevitable.

“I have Sir Isaac Newton’s personal assurance that it did indeed hit the moon, there’s no way for it to have escaped,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and space analyst, told AFP.

NASA and its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter probe and South Korea’s Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter were planning to take images of the site after impact, but it could take days to receive that information.

Linking to the European Southern Observatory’s post, Benjamin Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico told AFP: “I can confirm that the impact did occur.”

Fernando was the lead author of a recent paper on the anticipated impact, which had estimated the spacecraft weighed approximately 4,000kg on impact, assuming all of its propellant was spent.

Prior to the collision, NASA had emphasised that “there is no danger to Earth”.

“NASA scientists are planning to collect lunar data from the event and refine techniques for tracking objects in space,” the United States agency said.

“SPACE JUNK”

The Falcon 9 rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched in January 2025 carrying two lunar landers. Its booster returned to Earth, but the upper stage stayed in space to push the landers onward.

Generally on such missions, SpaceX performs a manoeuvre to make sure the second stage “is safe per the appropriate rules and regulations”, said Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA Science and Dragon Programs at SpaceX, at a Monday news conference.

“We did that,” she continued, but “what has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon”.