A Stray SpaceX Rocket Will Smash Into the Moon at Mach 7 in August, Analyst Says

When SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launched a pair of commercial lunar landers in January 2025, the rocket’s upper stage was supposed to return to Earth. Instead, it got stuck in a highly elliptical orbit, and an astronomer now says it’s going to hit the Moon. Bill Gray, an independent orbital analyst and creator of the Project Pluto object-tracking software, used this program to analyze the upper stage’s orbit and predict its future path. His findings indicate that the rocket will crash into the lunar surface at 5,400 miles per hour (8,700 kilometers per hour) at 2:44 a.m. ET on August 5. That’s seven times the speed of sound. “It doesn’t present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of,” he wrote in a post on the Project Pluto website. On January 15, 2025, a Falcon 9 rocket launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center carrying Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander and ispace’s Resilience lander. Both landers made it to the Moon, but Resilience crashed into the surface, bringing an early end to its mission. Blue Ghost successfully touched down and captured stunning footage of the Sun setting over the lunar