For the last several days, the web has been abuzz with talk about the Falcon 9 upper stage that was expected to crash into the moon. Much of the buzz has been wrong, or just trying to raise awareness (and funds), such as referring to it as a Falcon 9 rocket, when I think we all know that's just not how F9s work. The booster landed when this upper stage was making orbit (or about 8 minutes after liftoff, if you prefer).
No, this was just the upper stage of the Falcon 9 that launched two private landers to the moon — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Tokyo-based ispace's Resilience — launched to a high, moon-crossing Earth orbit in January 2025. The Falcon used up enough fuel that there wasn't enough to perform the usual maneuver to return to Earth.
So the company performed a different maneuver to take care of this upper stage, Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said during a press conference on Aug. 3.
"For high-energy missions, we need to perform a different maneuver to ensure the second stage itself is safe per the appropriate rules and regulations, and so we did that here," she said.
The problem was reality had some other things in mind.
"What has happened is, essentially, a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon," Scheiman said.
The upper stage slammed into the moon at 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 UTC). Because an exact impact spot wasn't known, they need to work with various other agencies to attempt to learn more, even if just before and after photos of the impact area.
"NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and NASA’s ShadowCam instrument on the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will look for opportunities to capture before‑and‑after imagery of the impact site," NASA spokesperson Rob Garner, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told Space.com. "Image availability depends on several factors, including the impact location, lighting conditions, and when each spacecraft’s orbit next carries it over the area, which may take a few days to receive any imagery."
Today's impact occurred on the sunlit side of the moon, reducing chances of hobbyist observers seeing anything. A quick search for news like that turned up nothing. So far the only observatory that claims to be sure they saw the impact is the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and reported detections of a lunar plume from the impact.
"We can safely say that we measured a response from the rocket stage impact as a sodium and lithium gas plume a few 10’s of kilometers in size lasting between 5 and 10 minutes after impact," Carl Schmidt told Inside Outer Space's Leonard David.
I'm only vaguely aware of what to expect from a measurement to detect the minerals in the dust column rising from the impact, but the Lowell Observatory provides this photo. I see this as showing two different frequency (or color) lights for sodium and one for lithium. This looks like what I'd expect.
Detections by the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, show evidence of a plume on the moon caused by the impact of a SpaceX rocket on Aug. 5, 2026. (Image credit: Carl Schmidt/Lowell Observatory)
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