A SpaceX rocket will soon hit the moon. Should you be worried?
A piece of a SpaceX rocket bound for the moon will impact the lunar surface. It raises questions about the cavalier way private companies are conducting space launches, experts said.
SpaceX seems to have mistaken shooting for the moon with shooting at the moon.
Forecast to occur on Aug. 5, a five-story-long piece of a rocket from one of the private space exploration company’s recent lunar missions is expected to hit the moon at around 5,400 miles per hour, around 24 times the speed of a Formula 1 racecar. As it currently stands, projections put the rocket’s crash course with the moon at 2:44 A.M. Eastern Time.
But what sounds like a disaster movie scenario will cause very little damage, experts said. The most that SpaceX’s rocket will do is create some flying moon rock and another lunar crater. Still, the incident raises concerns about the tradeoffs of handing over space launches to private companies that are increasingly dispatching more objects into space with few plans for how to deal with the space junk left behind, according to Anncy Thresher, an assistant professor of public policy, urban affairs and philosophy at Northeastern University.
“Infrastructure on the moon is currently sparse enough that we aren’t too worried about these kinds of uncontrolled impacts, but that will change in the future,” Thresher said. ”We need to be proactive now about how to regulate and remove space junk to avoid catastrophes going forward.”
The object that scientists say will strike the moon in August is the upper stage of one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets. Each of these rockets has two stages: a larger piece that propels a smaller, upper stage — the final section of the rocket — into orbit. The larger stage separates from the main rocket relatively early in the voyage and falls back to Earth, but the smaller portion, gets jettisoned while in orbit to propel the rocket forward, and typically stays there. In this case, the discarded part of SpaceX’s rocket, which was launched on January, 15 2025 and orbited the planet for over a year before getting caught in the moon’s gravitational pull.
This kind of rocket design –– sending parts that are no longer needed crashing down to Earth or suspended in low Earth orbit –– is not unique to SpaceX. Every rocket that has been sent into orbit has been a multistage rocket, Thresher said. But SpaceX’s unplanned lunar impact highlights the “pressing need” to figure out new ways to regulate space launches and handle an increasing collection of space junk that is starting to clog Earth’s atmosphere, according to Thresher.
SpaceX alone has launched 600 Falcon 9 rockets, not to mention the thousands of satellites in its artificial constellation, Starlink. Each of those 9 rockets has left an upper stage floating in orbit close to Earth, parts that can get caught in the gravitational pull of the sun or moon, sending it spinning into outer space.
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As space junk proliferates from more and more private space launches, it could create a barrier — like an artificial asteroid belt — that shreds future expeditions to the moon and beyond, Thresher explained.
More space junk also means more potential lunar crashes, although this is far from the first time a humanmade object has hit the moon. According to Bill Gray, an astronomer and the developer behind orbital monitoring site Project Pluto which identified the object’s lunar trajectory, humans have been trying to hit the moon for decades for the sake of science.
Going back to the lunar voyages of the 1970s, pieces of the rockets carrying Apollos 13 to 17 all struck the moon. The resulting “moonquakes” helped calibrate seismometers, which measured meteorite impacts, left by previous Apollo missions. NASA also hit the moon with the upper stage of a rocket in 2009 in an attempt to scatter and observe lunar water ice. The difference, Gray explained, is that those impacts were by design.
“And, of course, small asteroids hit the moon frequently; that’s why it has all those craters in the first place,” Gray said in a public post.
Any impact with the moon sends lunar rock flying and, with no air resistance in space to slow their flight, those shards of moon rock could become dangerous projectiles. While that poses little danger right now, the risk will only increase as more humans make their way to the moon in the future, Thresher explained.
If no steps are taken to regulate how space launches are conducted or how the ensuing space junk is collected, a crater on the moon could be the least of humanity’s worries, Thresher added. One of the long-held guiding principles of space exploration has been “planetary protection,” which aims to prevent contaminating other celestial bodies with bacteria and other life-forms from Earth. These kinds of accidental crashes put that at risk, especially as humanity sends spacecraft to other planets that are capable of sustaining life, unlike our moon, she said.
At the end of the day, “[Private] industry is — because it’s less answerable to the public for funding — able to ‘move fast and break things’ more easily than government institutions like NASA,” Thresher said. “That means that they’re often able to progress faster on projects, but things will also go wrong more often, too.”
