Space, Science

SpaceX rocket leaves a 60-foot crater on the Moon’s surface

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August 25, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal a crater on the Moon measuring 18.3 metres wide and less than 3.05 metres deep, the result of impact from debris from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Despite completing 677 missions, this unplanned lunar impact represents a rare event caused by human activity. Dimitra Atri of New York University Abu Dhabi’s Centre for Astrophysics and Space Science says the SpaceX incident highlights the risks astronauts will face during extended stays on permanent lunar bases, emphasizing the need to assess potential dangers as lunar expeditions expand.

Falcon 9 Impact Creates 18.3-Meter Lunar Crater

The impact of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket created a lunar crater measuring 18.3 metres wide and less than 3.05 metres deep, a surprisingly shallow depression given the impacting object was approximately the size of a school bus. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of the newly formed crater on August 5, requiring a deliberate tilt of the spacecraft to bring the impact site into view. This maneuver demonstrates the precision necessary to document the event and assess potential hazards for future lunar missions, as the crater’s dimensions offer insight into the energy of the collision.

The rocket’s upper stage, launched in January of the previous year, succumbed to the combined effects of solar activity and gravitational forces, altering its trajectory and ultimately leading to the crash. Atri added that both the US and China are planning permanent bases on the Moon, and monitoring and assessing potential risks is extremely important; NASA’s orbiter performed this task, but there was no ability to prevent such an event.

While the Moon is routinely impacted by meteors due to its lack of atmosphere, collisions originating from human-made objects present a new challenge for lunar safety protocols and long-term habitation plans. The UAE Space Agency, founded in 2014, is also actively involved in space exploration, with missions like the Hope probe to Mars and the upcoming MBR Explorer spacecraft demonstrating a growing international commitment to space endeavors.

This SpaceX episode perfectly highlights the risks the astronauts will face when they spend extended periods of time on permanent bases on the Moon.

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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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