A discarded piece of a SpaceX rocket may be heading for an unexpected lunar collision later this summer, adding a strange new twist to Elon Musk’s growing focus on the moon.
According to a new report from Project Pluto’s Bill Gray, a 45-foot upper-stage booster from a Falcon 9 launch in January 2025 is now expected to strike the moon on August 5. The object, identified as 2025-010D, was originally launched from Kennedy Space Center as part of missions tied to Firefly Aerospace and Japanese company ispace. Gray’s tracking estimates suggest the rocket hardware could slam into the moon’s western edge at roughly 5,400 miles per hour.
The impact is expected near the Einstein crater, a massive formation located along the moon’s far western limb. Because the region is difficult to observe from Earth, most people likely will not see the collision directly. Amateur astronomer Tony Dunn has already shared a simulation showing the projected impact path.
Right now, the debris is still orbiting Earth in a stretched 26-day pattern that carries it farther than the moon before pulling it back again. The object reaches distances of more than 310,000 miles from Earth, according to Gray’s analysis.
During that meeting, he described the moon as a launch point for larger ambitions involving Mars and deep-space exploration. “You have to go to the moon,” Musk reportedly told staff while discussing future computing power and space manufacturing.
The Falcon 9 hardware, now drifting toward the moon, came from the launch that carried Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace’s RESILIENCE lunar mission into space. Blue Ghost successfully landed on the moon in March 2025 and operated for more than two weeks, capturing widely shared images of a solar eclipse and lunar sunrise before shutting down.
The RESILIENCE mission did not have the same outcome; its Hakuto-R lander crashed during its June 2025 attempt to reach the lunar surface.
Space debris has become a growing issue beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The European Space Agency says roughly 35,000 tracked objects are currently orbiting Earth.
The sole bit of good news: a rocket stage colliding with the moon does not pose a direct threat to people.
But it comes at a time when both government agencies and private companies are planning long-term lunar operations.
That includes NASA’s Artemis program, which is working toward establishing a permanent human presence on the moon. Ironically, some of those future missions depend heavily on technology being developed by SpaceX itself.
