A discarded upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to crash into the moon on Wednesday, 2 August, at around 2:35am ET, striking near Einstein Crater in the moon's north-western region. The impact was not planned by SpaceX and highlights the growing amount of human-made debris drifting through space and eventually colliding with celestial bodies, an issue of increasing interest to scientists studying orbital and lunar debris.

The rocket stage, roughly the size of a five-storey building, is travelling at more than 5,000 miles per hour and is expected to carve out a crater at least 17 metres wide. It originally launched in January 2025 carrying two lunar landers and scientific instruments. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will image the site before and after the strike to detect surface changes, with analysis provided by space-object tracker Bill Gray. Experts say the collision will be hard to observe directly, though powerful telescopes might catch debris thrown up against the moon's dark terrain — a Los Alamos researcher noted it "is not something that you're going to see by pointing a pair of binoculars at the moon."