A spent Falcon 9 upper stage is predicted to slam into the Moon on 5 August 2026 at about 06:44 UTC, a strike expected to arrive at roughly seven times the speed of sound. Bill Gray said the object should hit near Einstein crater, after a long, looping journey that has kept it circling Earth since January 2025.

The vehicle is the spent second stage of the 2025-010D Falcon 9 rocket, the one SpaceX launched in January 2025 carrying the Blue Ghost mission 1 and Hakuto-R Mission 2 lunar landers. It now takes about 26 days to orbit Earth, with a perigee of roughly 220,000 kilometers, or 137,000 miles, and an apogee near 510,000 kilometers, while the Moon averages about 400,000 kilometers away. That geometry is what has put the object on a collision course, with its path intersecting the Moon’s gravitational track.

Gray said the motion of space junk is usually highly predictable because gravity from the Earth, Moon, Sun and planets can be tracked with immense precision. He also said that on August 5, they will reach that point at the same time. In his words, the orbit of the Moon and of this object intersect, and usually one passes through while the other is elsewhere. This time, the timing lines up.

The Falcon 9 is a partially reusable rocket, with a first stage that returns to Earth and a second stage that can remain in orbit. Many previous Falcon 9 second stages have fallen back to Earth or ended up in orbit around the Sun, but this one has stayed in the Earth-Moon system long enough to become a lunar-impact case. The upper stage is about 70 meters, or 230 feet, long and has a mass of about 550,000 kilograms, or 1.2 million pounds.

The Moon has seen deliberate impacts before. Apollo modules were smashed onto its surface in the 1970s to create small moonquakes for study, NASA crashed the LCROSS probe into the Moon in 2009, and a booster thought to be from Chang'e 5-T1 is believed to have hit the lunar far side in 2022. The coming impact is not a planned experiment, but it will still add one more human-made object to a body that has already absorbed a surprising amount of our discarded hardware.

For now, the answer to the main question is straightforward: unless the orbit changes, the Falcon 9 upper stage is on course to hit the Moon on 5 August 2026 at about 02:44 EDT, near Einstein crater. The timing may shift by minutes, but the destination is no longer in doubt.