After Drifting Through Space for 18 Months, SpaceX Rocket Crashes into Moon, Creating an Explosion Equivalent to 3 Tons of TNT on the Lunar Surface

The resulting crater is too small to be seen with the naked eye.

On Wednesday (5), the 8,000-pound SpaceX rocket’s upper stage, the size of a school bus, hit the Moon’s surface.

The impact had the power of three tons of TNT, sending out ‘a cloud of debris and dust’.

Korean and Chinese satellites captured images of the out-of-control rocket crash.

Watch the animation depicting the impact at seven times the speed of sound – NOT actual footage.

SpaceX rocket crashes into Moon, carving 100‑foot crater

A Falcon 9 stage slammed into the lunar surface at seven times the speed of sound, releasing energy equivalent to three tons of TNT

Still, the crater is too small to see from Earth with the naked eye pic.twitter.com/ZRxFO8ETIh

— RT (@RT_com) August 5, 2026

The Independent reported:

“The rocket stage is part of a Falcon 9 spacecraft launched in January 2025, which carried a lunar lander to the Moon’s surface. The impact was not planned, with SpaceX confirming that solar activity and gravitational forces drew the rocket’s second stage towards the Moon.

Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s Danuri lunar spacecraft snapped multiple images of the impact site during multiple passes over the Moon’s surface.”

Images from the Korea Aerospace Research Institute show the moon’s surface before and after the suspected collision from the SpaceX rocket.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched as part of a U.S. and Japanese mission in January 2025.

🔗 https://t.co/t5VfPMzctg pic.twitter.com/689skl2HgP

— Sky News (@SkyNews) August 6, 2026

Our team at @iaa_csic has captured the impact on the Moon of the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. We attach a preliminary video showing the evolution of the ejected material. The black area corresponds to the lunar disk @SpaceX @JuanLuisRizos @elonmusk @tiempobrasero @A3Noticias… pic.twitter.com/5Ry7hRdCeS

— Jose Maria Madiedo (@jmmadiedo) August 6, 2026

This was hardly the first impact on the moon, and many of those were intentional.

Space.com reported:

“Between 1993 and today, 11 probes — four from China, three from Japan, two from the U.S. and one each from India and the European Space Agency (ESA) — were intentionally deorbited at the end of the end of their missions around the moon.

Some of these impacts were performed to discard the craft, but others — like Lunar Prospector, LCROSS and Chandrayaan-1 — helped confirm the presence of water by examining the resulting plume.”

In the early hours of Wednesday, Aug. 5, a portion of a @SpaceX rocket impacted on the Moon’s surface. In this video, we answer some of your questions. pic.twitter.com/BhWcGfRYMO

— NASA (@NASA) August 5, 2026

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