HELSINKI - A discarded Falcon 9 upper stage that launched a pair of commercial lunar landers in January 2025 has apparently decided the moon makes a perfectly fine final resting place. Astronomers project it will impact the lunar surface on August 5.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and the ispace Hakuto-R Resilience landers rode a Falcon 9 into space back in January 2025. Blue Ghost made a successful landing; the upper stage, however, has been loitering in a highly elliptical Earth orbit with a period of about 26 days, taking it past the moon. That wandering is about to end with a very literal bang.
Bill Gray, an astronomer, independent orbital analyst, and author of the Project Pluto tracking software, announced that the stage - officially designated 2025-010D - will impact in or near Einstein crater on the western limb of the moon at 2:44 a.m. Eastern (0644 UTC) on August 5. The prediction comes from 1,053 observations made by asteroid surveys and telescopes. “The upper stage… had a few close passes by the moon and Earth, but nothing that was close enough to look like a possible impact,” Gray wrote. “The asteroid surveys observed it whenever it wasn’t too close to the sun or moon to see.” Estimates will be refined over the coming months.
The U.S. Space Force tracks objects in orbit via radar, which Gray notes is great for spotting even astronaut-lost gloves and tool bags in low Earth orbit. Telescopes, however, are better for distant objects like this aimless rocket part. Swiss space situational awareness firm s2A systems provided SpaceNews with a short animation showing 2025-010D tumbling across the starfield, with periodic flashes confirming the stage is spinning like a tipsy dancer.
The roughly 4,000-kilogram, 13.8-meter-long upper stage is expected to hit the moon at 2.43 kilometers per second (8,700 km/h). The event poses no risk and likely won’t be visible from Earth, particularly since the impact occurs on a sunlit portion of the lunar surface. Gray is confident about timing and location but notes that gentle forces like solar radiation pressure can build over months and tweak an orbit. “But come August, we’ll have a quite precise idea of where it will hit,” he wrote.
This will be a rare unintentional lunar impact by an artificial object, following the 2022 crash of a Long March 3B upper stage from the 2014 Chang’e-5T1 mission, which created a double crater on the far side. Gray first flagged that impact too, though he initially misidentified the stage as a SpaceX Falcon 9 from the DSCOVR launch. This time, the Falcon 9 stage has been tracked since launch - no mistaken identity required.