One of Elon Musk‘s discarded SpaceX rockets has crashed into the moon’s surface at 5,400 miles per hour (8,690 km/h).
The out-of-control spacecraft is the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, which weighs 4,500 kg and measures 39 feet long (12 m), about the size of a five-story building.
The rocket struck near the Einstein Crater, on the moon’s western edge facing Earth.
Scientists estimate that its impact produced a blast equivalent to 15,000 sticks of dynamite, or three tonnes of TNT.
That should produce a flash big enough to see from Earth using a telescope, but not with the naked eye.
Due to the lack of wind and low gravity, the impact will also launch a cloud of dust and debris that will linger for tens of minutes.
Scientists and space agencies were carefully watching as the rocket approached, but we are still waiting to see if any pictures of the crash were captured.
Astronomers expect that the impact will carve a crater into the lunar surface roughly 27 metres across and five metres deep.
One of Elon Musk’s discarded SpaceX rockets has crashed into the moon. Pictured: The rocket launching in January 2025, from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, in January last year.
It was carrying two private lunar landers, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Resilience, into lunar orbit and was not intended to crash into the moon.
Parts of the Falcon 9 are designed to be reusable, safely returning to Earth after pushing the upper stages out into space.
However, other sections are simply jettisoned and left to drift through space, where they usually burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
However, after delivering the scientific instruments to the moon, the upper stage has been drifting through space under the influence of the moon’s gravitational pull.
NASA’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), concluded that the rocket was on a collision course with our lunar satellite after independent astronomers noticed its dangerous trajectory.
