SpaceX’s Forgotten Booster May Slam Into the Moon

When SpaceX lofted two lunar landers on a Falcon 9 back in January 2025, most eyes were on the payloads, not the spent booster that would be left adrift in a deep‑space orbit. Fast‑forward a year and a half, and that very upper stage, catalogued as 2025‑010D, is on a collision course with the Moon.

Independent orbital analyst Bill Gray – the guy behind the Project Pluto tracker – crunched the numbers and says the stage will punch the Moon’s near side on 5 August 2026 at roughly 06:44 UTC (02:44 a.m. ET). The impact point? Somewhere near the Einstein crater on the Moon’s western limb, a spot that barely peeks over the edge from Earth.

What does this mean in plain language? The dead‑weight of the booster – about four tonnes, 13.8 m long and 3.7 m in diameter – will be travelling at a little over 2.4 km per second when it hits. That’s roughly seven times the speed of sound in air, only in a vacuum where the sound notion is a bit moot.

NASA’s own William Cooke, who manages the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, was quick to tone down any romantic visions of a fireworks show. “It will be very, very hard to see, if not impossible,” he told reporters, echoing a dpa quote that made the Euronews headline.

Why the impact is interesting isn’t just the drama of a piece of hardware finding a new home on the lunar surface. It’s the fact that this is an unplanned, essentially accidental deposition of a sizeable mass onto the Moon – something we rarely get to observe, at least not with modern instrumentation.

There’s still a sliver of uncertainty, of course. Small orbital tweaks, solar‑radiation pressure and the inevitable measurement errors mean the exact spot and exact second could shift by a few minutes or a few kilometres. But the broad picture is clear: unless something dramatically alters its trajectory, that orphaned stage will meet the Moon in August.

For now, the scientific community will watch the predicted impact zone, perhaps with a few telescopes trained on the limb when the Moon is favourably illuminated. And the rest of us can marvel at how a launch meant for a moon landing could, years later, add a fresh, albeit tiny, scar to our celestial neighbour.