SpaceX Falcon 9 Stage to Hit Moon August 5

A discarded upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to crash into the Moon's surface near the Einstein crater on August 5 at 2:44 a.m. EDT, traveling at approximately 5,400 miles per hour, or about seven times the speed of sound.

Astronomer Bill Gray, who developed the Project Pluto software for tracking near-Earth objects, made the prediction after analyzing more than 1,000 observations of the booster collected by asteroid surveys over the past year. The 45-foot upper stage launched on January 15, 2025, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, carrying two commercial lunar landers: Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, which successfully touched down in March 2025, and ispace's Hakuto-R, which crash-landed in June 2025 after losing contact with Earth.

The booster was intended to reenter Earth's atmosphere and burn up after deploying the landers on their lunar trajectories. Instead, it entered a highly elliptical orbit around Earth, completing a loop roughly every 26 days. At its farthest point, the orbit extends about 310,000 miles from Earth, intersecting the Moon's path through cislunar space. Gray's calculations show the objects aligning for impact on August 5 near the...