A spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage is on course to crash into the moon on Aug. 5, 2026, but experts say the impact likely will not be visible from Earth with backyard telescopes.
The discarded rocket stage — catalogued as object 2025-010D — is the upper section of the Falcon 9 that launched Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 2 toward the moon on Jan. 15, 2025. Since then, the roughly 4-metric-ton (4.4-ton) stage has been looping around the Earth in a wide, 26-day orbit, gradually losing energy until its trajectory bent toward the lunar surface.
Independent astronomer Bill Gray of Project Pluto first flagged the impending impact in late 2025 using orbit-tracking software that has accumulated more than 1,000 observations of the drifting booster.
“We now have another upper stage due to hit the moon, this one on Aug. 5 and (just barely) on the near side of the moon,” Gray told Space.com.
The current best estimate places the impact at approximately 06:44 UTC (2:44 a.m. EDT) on Aug. 5, 2026. The stage will be traveling at roughly 2.4 kilometers per second (5,400 mph) when it strikes — more than seven times the speed of sound.
The predicted impact site sits near Einstein Crater, a large lunar impact feature along the moon’s western limb. This area sits at the boundary between the lunar near side and far side, making it only occasionally visible from Earth due to the moon’s libration — a subtle wobble that exposes slightly different portions of the surface over time.
The moon will be just past its last quarter phase at the time of impact, meaning more than half of the visible disk will be illuminated. The impact zone will be on the sunlit portion near the edge of the disk.
Will we be able to see it?
The short answer, according to multiple experts, is probably not.
William Cooke, who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, told Space.com the event will likely be extremely subtle. “I think it’s going to be very, very hard to see, if not impossible,” Cooke said. “But there’s always a chance.”
The challenges are twofold. First, the impact flash itself will be brief — lasting only a fraction of a second — and may be lost in the glare of the sunlit lunar surface. Second, the predicted site is near the bright limb of a partially illuminated moon, making any small flash extremely difficult to pick out against the background.
Gray himself is cautious. He noted that NASA’s 2009 LCROSS mission deliberately slammed a Centaur rocket stage into a permanently shadowed lunar crater in the hope of seeing a flash from Earth. “Even with that, nothing was seen,” Gray said. “It’ll be above the horizon for me in Maine, and I expect to go out with my small telescope and take a look. But I can’t come up with a reason why this would be much brighter than LCROSS. And this object will be hitting in bright sunlight.”
One slim possibility is a sun-illuminated dust plume. If the impact occurs near enough to the limb, sunlight could catch the ejected material and make it briefly visible. Cooke suggested that observers keep an eye out not just for the impact flash but also for any brightening in the vicinity of the predicted site in the minutes afterward.
“These flashes are so short, they can very much mimic a cosmic ray impact on your detector,” said Brian Day, citizen science lead at NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI). He encourages amateur astronomers to participate in the Impact Flash! program, which coordinates multiple observers to confirm real lunar impacts.
Scientific value
While most skywatchers may be disappointed, scientists see this as an opportunity. The impact offers a rare chance to study a lunar collision where the mass, velocity, and composition of the impactor are all known precisely. That knowledge helps refine models of how impact craters form and how material is ejected from the lunar surface.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is expected to play a key role. According to Brent Garry, LRO project scientist, the spacecraft will pass over the crash site approximately seven days before and seven days after the impact. The post-impact pass should allow LRO’s camera system to image the fresh crater and compare it with earlier imagery, helping scientists measure the crater’s size, shape, and ejecta pattern.
“This is not going to look like a typical meteoroid impact crater,” Gray noted. The hollow, lightweight structure of the rocket stage will interact with the lunar surface differently than a solid rock of the same mass.
History of lunar impacts
This will not be the first human-made object to strike the moon. The Soviet Union’s Luna 2 became the first in 1959. Several Apollo mission upper stages were deliberately crashed into the moon in the 1970s to generate moonquakes for seismometers left by astronauts. In 2009, NASA’s LCROSS impact kicked up dust from a permanently shadowed crater and confirmed the presence of water ice.
More recently, in 2022, what is believed to be a Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 booster impacted the lunar far side, leaving a rare double crater that was later imaged by LRO.
The Falcon 9 impact differs in that it was entirely unintentional, highlighting the growing challenge of space debris beyond low-Earth orbit. As humanity ramps up lunar activity — with NASA’s Artemis program, Chinese crewed missions, and a surge of commercial landers — the space around the moon is becoming increasingly congested.
“It doesn’t present any danger to anyone,” Gray said, “though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware is disposed of.”
A reminder of the moon’s dynamic nature
For those hoping to catch a glimpse, the practical advice from experts is clear: do not expect a show. The impact will occur at a specific moment, but the flash is unlikely to be visible without professional-grade equipment and precise pointing. Dedicated amateur observers with large telescopes and specialized cameras may attempt to capture it, but the odds are long.
Cooke summed it up simply: “If you’ve got the time and the inclination, it might be worth a look.”
The Falcon 9’s upper stage has spent more than 18 months circling the Earth since helping deliver two private landers toward the moon. Blue Ghost successfully touched down in Mare Crisium on March 2, 2025, operating NASA science instruments for two weeks. The Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander, Resilience, was lost shortly before touchdown on June 5, 2025.
Now, the rocket that sent them on their way will join them on the lunar surface — not as a lander, but as an impactor. A piece of hardware built to explore will become part of the landscape it helped reach.
As Brian Day put it: “This impact is a great reminder of this wonderful environment of the moon. It is being whacked. It is changing.”