A rocket crashed into the Moon on Wednesday, and we knew the exact second

On Wednesday, August 5, at 8 hours, 35 minutes and 37.5 seconds, Brussels time, a Falcon 9 upper stage hit the Moon at 8,700 kilometers per hour. Nobody had planned it. Yet everyone had known about it for months.

The most interesting thing isn't the impact. It's that an astronomer, working on his own, was able to announce the location and the exact second of the impact eighteen months in advance. All on a website that looks like it dates back to 1998.

Where this thing came from

The object is called 2025-010D. Translation: it's the tenth object placed in orbit in 2025. It is the upper stage of the Falcon 9 launched on January 15, 2025. The rocket was carrying two landers to the Moon: Blue Ghost, from Firefly Aerospace, and the Japanese Resilience, from ispace.

Eighteen months of drifting, and still no return service.

Once its job was done, this stage had nowhere to go. It had too much energy to fall gently back to Earth, but not enough to escape permanently. So it remained in the Earth-Moon system. Sometimes pulled by one, sometimes by the other, it followed a trajectory that nobody controlled. This drift lasted almost nineteen months.

How you predict this to within half a second

The man behind this prediction is called Bill Gray. He runs Project Pluto and tracks objects placed in high orbit, especially those that no one is looking after anymore. As of February 26, 2026, he had gathered 1,053 observations of this stage. Others were added to the data right up until the final days.

Using these observations, he published a precise prediction: August 5, 2026, at 06:35:37.5, in Universal Time. The impact was expected to occur at latitude 19.461 north and longitude 93.293 west, very close to Einstein crater, on the western edge of the lunar disk.

Behind this calculation, there was no secret NASA software. There was an astronomer, a network of often amateur observers, and a great deal of celestial mechanics, the science that makes it possible to calculate the movement of objects in space.

And it worked. The South Korean orbiter Danuri began observing the area half an hour before the impact. It then carried out eight imaging sessions by adjusting its orbit. The American LRO passed over the site approximately seven days before the impact, then seven days afterward. This provided images of the same location before and after the impact.

The time he got it wrong—and wrote about it

The best part of this story goes back to 2022. Bill Gray undertook the same exercise. He announced that a Falcon 9 stage, used to launch DSCOVR in 2015, was going to hit the Moon. The news spread around the world. Then he went back over his calculations, realized he was wrong, and acknowledged it on his own website.

“We now know that this object is not SpaceX's launch vehicle: it was an identification error on my part.”

The object was actually 2014-065B, the stage of the Chinese Chang'e 5-T1 mission. China never confirmed that this piece of space junk belonged to it.

On the left, the double crater from 2022 and its never-resolved mystery. On the right, the crater we expected to see.

One detail was never explained: the 2022 crater was double. Two holes side by side indicate the presence of two heavy masses in the stage. There was the engine, plus something else that nobody identified.

Personally, I find that more impressive than the prediction itself. Bill Gray published his mistake on his own website, in the middle of the media frenzy, when he could have kept quiet. That's exactly the kind of attitude we'd like to see more often.

What it did up there

The stage is 13.8 meters long and weighs approximately 4 tons empty. Launched at 8,700 kilometers per hour into the lunar surface, it leaves little room for suspense.

Basically, a bus launched at Mach 7 into sand.

Estimates predict a crater 20 to 30 meters wide and approximately 5 meters deep. The impact would have lifted 1.1 million kilos of lunar dust. Since the Moon has no atmosphere, the plume can rise very high before gently falling back down.

This collision is also of genuine scientific interest. When studying a crater, we generally know neither the mass of the object that created it, nor its speed, nor its angle of arrival, nor the exact date of the impact. Here, all four are known. Scientists therefore have a calibrated experiment with which to adjust their models. These models are then used to date other craters in the solar system. For once, the answer key is on the back of the notebook.

So what does this actually change for you?

On the Moon, absolutely nothing. It is one more crater on a rock that has millions of them, in a region nobody visits. You can sleep soundly.

However, this story reveals two problems that really do concern you.

1. The trash spinning above your head

The European Space Agency tracks approximately 35,000 objects in orbit around Earth. They are not all satellites. Most are fragments: abandoned stages, bolts, paint chips, and remnants of collisions.

Your car's GPS, your living-room satellite dish, and tomorrow's weather share the same neighborhood.

These debris travel through the same areas as the satellites used by your car's GPS, the images that make weather forecasts possible, and the dish installed on your roof. When a piece of debris hits a satellite, it does not produce just one additional fragment. It can create thousands. It is the only place where cleaning up costs less than doing nothing, and where nobody does it anyway.

2. Nobody cleans up, and it is written nowhere

Since Luna 2 in 1959, approximately 3,000 human-made objects have been resting on the Moon, for a total of 209 tonnes. No text requires anyone to retrieve them. In practice, a stage that has completed its work no longer belongs to anyone. On paper, its owner has no obligation to go and get it.

As for the schedule for the big cleanup, let us be honest. A few debris-removal missions are being prepared, but each targets only one object. At this rate, it would take centuries. The cleanup will happen in ten years, in twenty years, or never.

The precedent exists, and it is not reassuring. As long as a place seems vast and distant, dumping waste there costs nothing and goes unnoticed. We already know how the story ends with the ocean floor. Now we are replaying the same film a hundred kilometers higher.

What I think

What astounds me is not the impact. It is the precision. We are talking about half a second of uncertainty for a four-ton object drifting for eighteen months under the influence of three celestial bodies. The calculation came from one man working alone, helped by data from volunteer observers. Even Newton had left this problem aside.

The second point that strikes me is the identity of those who did the work. SpaceX was not tracking this stage. NASA was not either. Astronomers, many of them amateurs, monitored it for a year and a half. They did it for free, simply because the subject interested them.

I still have one reservation at the end. None of this was an accident. But it was not really a choice either. It is simply what happens when you launch something without planning how its journey is supposed to end.