Kelsey Young – SpaceX Lunar Impact

In the early hours of Wednesday, Aug. 5, a portion of a SpaceX rocket impacted on the Moon's surface. In this video, we answer some of your questions.

What is said in the film

Well, in the early hours of Wednesday, August 5th, a upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket made an unplanned impact on the lunar surface. This Falcon 9 upper stage was from a January 2025 launch that successfully deployed Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 lander through NASA's Clips initiative, or the Commercial Lunar Payload Services. A combination of solar activity and gravitational forces actually prompted the unplanned impact. NASA did not purposely plan to have this upper stage impact the Moon. However, this is not something we're really concerned about.

This is actually a technically accepted and safe method of disposing of hardware and low lunar orbit. And in some cases, mission operators actually choose to end their mission by impacting their hardware on the lunar surface. Because it's a predictable and trackable strategy for end of life hardware disposal. This poses absolutely no danger to anyone on Earth or any hardware on the Moon. And in fact, scientists are eager to to study this impact event as it can help us constrain how to track things like this in the future.

We love the Moon for so many reasons, and one of those reasons is that it's a natural laboratory for processes happening all over the solar system. There's no atmosphere or environment, and the regolith or the surface of the Moon is stable over really long periods of time. Impact cratering, especially, is a process that occurs across the entire solar system, and by impacting an object of known size at a known velocity into the lunar surface. It can help scientists constrain the impact cratering process, and what kind of impact crater results from an impact of that size. The Moon is always being hit by things.

Meteors, asteroids, comets and things hit the Moon all the time across its 4 billion year old history. In fact, Artemis II astronauts actually observed several active impact flashes, or craters forming on the lunar surface during just their several hour flyby.

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