Images Show New Crater From SpaceX Rocket's Moon Impact

A lost piece of a SpaceX rocket has officially left its mark on the moon, NBC News reports. NASA has released before-and-after images showing a fresh, 60-foot-wide crater carved by the uncontrolled crash of a Falcon 9 upper stage on Aug. 5, when the 10,800-pound booster slammed into the lunar surface at roughly 5,400 mph.

The photos, taken six days later by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, reveal a shallow pit less than 10 feet deep with bright and dark rays of ejected material stretching outward. The booster, which launched two lunar landers in January 2025, had been drifting in space for more than a year before gravity and solar forces steered it moonward, the AP reports—an unusually rare example of human-made space junk striking the moon and a fresh data point in debates over space sustainability. CNN reports the upper stage was "intentionally discarded" in space, but the "quirks of orbital dynamics" set it on its collision course.

"This is not something we're really concerned about. This is actually a technically accepted and safe method of disposing of hardware in low lunar orbit," a NASA lunar scientist says. "The moon is always being hit by things: meteors, asteroids, comets."