The wreckage of a SpaceX rocket weighing about 5 tons is about to hit the moon. This rocket once sent two lunar landers to the moon, and this impact was not a planned operation. Bill Gray, head of the “Pluto Project,” which tracks celestial orbits, has developed celestial tracking software. According to his estimates, the upper stage of this abandoned Falcon 9 rocket will hit the vicinity of the Einstein crater on the western edge of the moon at a speed of 5,400 miles per hour at around 2:34 a.m. EST on August 5. On January 15, 2025, SpaceX used the Falcon 9 rocket to launch Firefly Aviation's “Blue Ghost 1” lunar lander and Japan's “Resilience” lander to the moon. “Blue Ghost 1” successfully made a soft landing on the lunar surface on March 2, 2025; “Resilience” lost its connection 90 seconds before landing and eventually crashed on the surface of the moon. Researchers explained that after the end of this mission, the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket was abandoned in a high Earth orbit that would pass through the lunar orbit, and now it has finally embarked on the trajectory of hitting the moon. Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said: “We are unable to determine how much SpaceX knew about this impact. What is certain is that since this upper stage undertook the lunar payload delivery mission, the orbit that was eventually launched into there is a possibility that it will hit the moon itself. Whether the company anticipated the risk but did not explain it to the outside world, or whether it did not perform orbital calculations at all, we have no way of verifying this.”
Zhitongcaijing · 2d ago
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The wreckage of a SpaceX rocket weighing about 5 tons is about to hit the moon. This rocket once sent two lunar landers to the moon, and this impact was not a planned operation. Bill Gray, head of the “Pluto Project,” which tracks celestial orbits, has developed celestial tracking software. According to his estimates, the upper stage of this abandoned Falcon 9 rocket will hit the vicinity of the Einstein crater on the western edge of the moon at a speed of 5,400 miles per hour at around 2:34 a.m. EST on August 5. On January 15, 2025, SpaceX used the Falcon 9 rocket to launch Firefly Aviation's “Blue Ghost 1” lunar lander and Japan's “Resilience” lander to the moon. “Blue Ghost 1” successfully made a soft landing on the lunar surface on March 2, 2025; “Resilience” lost its connection 90 seconds before landing and eventually crashed on the surface of the moon. Researchers explained that after the end of this mission, the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket was abandoned in a high Earth orbit that would pass through the lunar orbit, and now it has finally embarked on the trajectory of hitting the moon. Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said: “We are unable to determine how much SpaceX knew about this impact. What is certain is that since this upper stage undertook the lunar payload delivery mission, the orbit that was eventually launched into there is a possibility that it will hit the moon itself. Whether the company anticipated the risk but did not explain it to the outside world, or whether it did not perform orbital calculations at all, we have no way of verifying this.”
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