Elon Musk-owned SpaceX rocket leaves new human scar on the moon's face - Sarmad

It carried no astronauts, and its fall was not part of the mission plan. However, the final stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ended a 18-month drift by crashing into the Moon on Wednesday, August 5, at a speed of nearly 8,700 kilometers per hour. While the impact likely created a new crater and ejected dozens of tons of lunar material, the collision has become a rare scientific opportunity to study lunar geology, while simultaneously serving as a warning about space debris. This occurs as the United States and other nations prepare to transform the Moon into a destination for more sustainable visits, according to Monte Carlo.

A Journey That Began with a Successful Mission and Ended in an Unplanned Collision

The story began on January 15, 2025, when Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida, carrying two commercial lunar landers: Blue Ghost 1, belonging to the American company Firefly Aerospace, and a Japanese lander owned by ispace.

The rocket successfully sent both landers on their way to the Moon, and its first stage—the reusable booster—returned to Earth. Blue Ghost later achieved a smooth landing on the near side of the Moon and conducted scientific experiments, including lunar soil analysis. Meanwhile, the Japanese lander crashed during the final phase of its landing attempt.

However, the upper stage of the Falcon 9, an object approximately 14 meters long (roughly the height of a five-story building) and weighing an estimated four tons after fuel consumption, remained in space.

It was supposed to stay away from the Moon, but solar activity and gravitational forces gradually altered its orbit. According to Giuliana Chiaramonti, Director of NASA Programs and Dragon Vehicles at SpaceX, a "combination of solar activity and gravitational forces" ultimately placed the stage on a trajectory toward the Moon.

Independent astronomers were the first to notice this trajectory using publicly available data, before the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that the probability of the stage colliding with the Moon had reached 100 percent.

The impact occurred near the craters Einstein and Bell in the Moon’s northern hemisphere, at a speed of approximately 2.43 kilometers per second, or about 8,690 kilometers per hour.

The flash resulting from the impact was not visible to the naked eye from Earth, and its location and lighting conditions made it extremely difficult to observe, even with telescopes.

However, the European Southern Observatory’s giant telescope in Chile detected, at the time of impact, spectral lines that the observatory described as "chemical fingerprints" of sodium and lithium within the impact cloud, which lasted between five and ten minutes. Scientists believe the sodium originated from lunar soil, while the lithium may have come from the rocket itself, providing scientific evidence of the collision.

A New Crater on the Moon... and an Unplanned "Experiment" for Scientists

NASA estimates that the impact created a crater approximately 60 feet (18 meters) wide and 12 feet (4 meters) deep, while other scientific models suggest its diameter could reach up to 30 meters.

The impact is expected to have ejected significant amounts of lunar dust and rocks to high altitudes. Some estimates indicate that the dust cloud may have risen to about 100 kilometers above the surface and persisted for several minutes.

Scientific communities are now awaiting images that will pinpoint the crater’s true location and size. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, along with South Korea’s Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter and its ShadowCam instrument, plans to image the area and compare pre- and post-impact photographs. However, this process could take days, or even longer, to process the images, as imaging depends on the spacecrafts’ orbital positions and the lighting angles above the lunar surface.

Although the incident was unintentional, scientists view it as a rare natural experiment with exceptionally well-known conditions. Unlike meteorites that strike the Moon, researchers in this case know the object’s approximate mass, velocity, composition, and trajectory. This allows them to compare these parameters with the crater’s size and the materials ejected by the impact.

NASA stated that the data will help scientists “better understand artificial impacts and their implications for exploration,” as well as improve techniques for tracking objects in space.

Human-made impacts on the Moon are not unprecedented. During the Apollo program, the United States deliberately crashed rocket stages onto the Moon to record the impacts using seismometers. In 2009, NASA also sent a rocket stage to impact near the lunar south pole as part of the LCROSS mission, searching for signs of water ice.

According to NASA, the Moon naturally experiences impacts with energy similar to that of this rocket approximately once every six days, as it lacks an atmosphere to slow down incoming objects.

From lunar dust to future bases… Why does this impact matter for scientists?

The scientific value of the incident lies not only in the crater itself, but in the materials ejected from the lunar surface.

Lunar regolith is highly abrasive, resembling ground glass in its effects—a problem known to Apollo astronauts more than half a century ago, when dust caused wear and tear on spacesuit components, joints, and insulating seals.

Olivier Sanguy, head of space news at Cité de l’Espace in Toulouse, said that studying how far the regolith was ejected by this impact could help determine safe distances between spacecraft landing sites and future crewed facilities, ensuring that a landing or accident does not damage nearby habitation modules or scientific equipment.

These questions are no longer purely theoretical. America’s Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon and develop a more sustainable presence there. Meanwhile, former U.S. President Donald Trump spoke of returning American astronauts to the Moon before the end of his term in January 2029, and establishing a lunar base by 2030.

The Moon also serves as a testbed for developing technologies that humans may need in future missions farther away, particularly to Mars.

Space agencies are paying special attention to craters in the south pole region, where areas have remained in shadow for long periods and are believed to contain water ice. Water there is not just for drinking; hydrogen and oxygen can be extracted from it to provide breathable oxygen and potentially produce fuel, enabling future missions to utilize resources away from Earth.

In this sense, a small crater created by a wayward rocket may hold information far exceeding its size: How does the lunar surface behave when struck by a human-made vehicle? How far does the dust spread? And where can facilities be established without exposing them to the risks of landings or impacts?

Three thousand human footprints

However, the less poetic side of the incident is stark. According to estimates cited by the BBC, there are now approximately 3,000 human-made objects on the Moon, with a combined mass of nearly 190 tons, while the problem of space debris orbiting Earth itself is worsening at a much faster rate. According to the European Space Agency, more than 46,000 tracked pieces of space debris are in orbit, with a total mass of approximately 17,000 tons.

Astronomer Matt Bootwell has warned that continued accumulation of debris could make access to space beyond Earth’s orbit more difficult in the coming decades if the space surrounding the planet becomes too congested.

Meanwhile, astronomer Jennifer Millard described the Falcon 9 impact as a “warning sign,” noting that this return of humans to the Moon will not be limited to short visits lasting a few days, as was the case during the Apollo era. Instead, it may involve missions lasting weeks or months, crewed bases, and permanent scientific equipment.

In this context, the meaning of an uncontrolled rocket stage crashing changes. What poses no danger today, because it struck an empty area, could in the future hit a crewed base, a scientific facility, or a historic site such as the Apollo landing zones.

Hugh Lewis, a space safety professor at the University of Birmingham, argues that transforming the Moon into a permanent human destination will require orbital infrastructure and an increasing density of missions, thereby necessitating stricter rules and standards for managing rocket stages and debris.

NASA, for its part, emphasizes that disposing of upper stages through controlled lunar impacts is a technically acceptable and safe method, and may sometimes be the only practical option for certain missions in low lunar orbit. The key difference here lies in the ability to control and predict the impact location.

The agency has reaffirmed its commitment to minimizing debris and adopting responsible practices that protect Earth, its orbital environment, and other celestial bodies. Meanwhile, Chaimean stated that NASA and SpaceX are already discussing ways to avoid unplanned lunar impacts in the future.

The Moon We Dream Of… and the Moon We Are Already Changing

Since humanity first looked up at the sky, the Moon has been more than just a rocky body orbiting Earth; it has been a clock for the night, a guide for travelers, and an image of the “distant beloved,” a mirror upon which humanity’s poems and dreams were hung before their rockets arrived.

Today, humanity has added a small new scar to the Moon’s ancient craters. This scar will not change the face of the Moon we see from our windows, and in years to come, it may be nothing more than an unknown point among millions of craters. Yet it carries the paradox of our era: the closer we get to the Moon scientifically, the greater our responsibility toward it becomes.

The neighbor that illuminated human nights from afar for thousands of years is no longer entirely distant. If we are preparing this time to return to stay, the challenge will not only be learning how to reach the Moon, but also how to leave behind the smallest possible trace of our passage, so that it remains a place for science… and for a bit of dreaming as well.