A scrap of a rocket built by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX will slam into the moon on Wednesday.
In January 2025, a Falcon 9 rocket carried two lunar landers and scientific instruments to Earth’s closest neighbour.
But it was a one-way trip, leaving the 45-foot-tall upper half of the rocket adrift, eventually snagged by the moon’s orbit.
Now a 4,900kg chunk of it will collide with our one natural satellite at a speed of 5,400mph – seven times the speed of sound – at 7.35am.
The hunk of space junk will smash the sunlit side of the moon facing Earth with the equivalent energy of three tons of TNT, said space expert Bill Gray.
Gray, behind the Project Pluto software that tracks objects adrift in the cosmos, said the impact could leave a crater 17 meters in diameter.
‘It doesn’t present any danger to anyone,’ he added.
‘Though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.’
SpaceX did not plan for the dead rocket piece to hit the moon, according to the Associated Press. Metro has approached SpaceX for comment.
Will… the moon be okay?
If you’ve ever looked up at the moon, you’ve probably noticed that it’s not a smooth grey ball. It’s covered in dome-like bumps and pocked with craters.
In other words, the moon is used to getting banged around by space rocks. As there are no gooey tectonic plates or atmosphere to sweep up the craters like on Earth, the moon carries these scars for life.
Dr Ed Bloomer, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich in London tells Metro that you don’t need to worry about this rocket destroying the moon.
‘In fact, it will likely go unnoticed in the UK,’ Dr Bloomer says.
‘While the rocket part colliding with the lunar surface is quite a large piece of kit, and it is moving at a fairly impressive speed, it is certainly not going to cause any problems.
‘After all, the moon is pretty large and desolate, and we know precisely where and when the collision will occur.’
Will the UK be able to see the crash?
Kind of. Gray doubts that you’ll be able to see the collision even with a professional telescope, let alone the naked eye or binoculars.
From Earth, the rocket will land on the outskirts – called the ‘limb’ – on the sunlit side that’s only visible every now and then as the moon wobbles.
You might see the ejecta plume – a dust cloud – as lunar dirt is flung into the air (well, not ‘air’ in the literal sense) through a sensitive telescope.
That, or you might catch a ‘flash’ as some of the energy from the impact is released as light, though Gray suspects it will be rather dim.
Sadly for people in the UK, only the eastern portions of the US and Canada, and much of South America, will have the best views.
Dr Bloomer says that even British stargazers might be able to catch the rather permanent aftermath of the lunar smash.
‘Afterwards, the moon will have a quite small new crater!’ he says, which should roughly be in the northwestern portion near the Einstein Crater.
Brent Garry, a project scientist for Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, said in June that the orbiter will pass over the crash site.
‘We can do some additional targeting about a week after the impact and get some targeting over where the site is,’ he said.
Wait, what is ‘space junk’?
The rocket ship part is what experts like Dean Sladen, an aerospace engineer at Accu Components, calls ‘space junk’.
‘Space junk is any human-made object in orbit, or falling back to Earth, that no longer serves a purpose,’ says Sladen, of the precision engineering components supplier which tracks and analyses space junk.
‘That covers everything from spent rocket stages and dead satellites down to bolts, paint flecks and fragments from old collisions.
‘There are tens of thousands of trackable objects up there right now, and many more too small to track.’
And SpaceX is behind an increasing number of them, given it conducts half of all global launches, Accu Component’s space race report found.
For Dr Bloomer, the skies above our heads are becoming a stellar dumping ground – Wednesday’s rocket smash won’t be the last.
After all, it will be the second dead rocket known to crash into the moon accidentally.
A Chinese rocket segment dug out a pair of craters on the moon’s far side, sometimes called the dark side, in 2022. Nasa’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, meanwhile, fell onto that same side in 2009.
‘Although we generally track manmade debris with high precision, even for tiny objects, we continue to add to the swarm of material in the local neighbourhood, astronomically speaking,’ Dr Bloomer adds.
‘Avoiding further pollution and reducing existing material is a phenomenal technical challenge, but of increasing importance for future spaceflight operations.’
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