Why did falcon 9 hit the moon?

Between 11 and 12 August 2026 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed a fresh scar on the Moon. It had formed on 5 August, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage impacted the surface following its January 2025 launch of the Firefly Blue Ghost 1 mission. The crater is 60 feet wide and, judging by the length of its shadow, less than 10 feet deep, at 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E. A trajectory prediction from NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies proved accurate to about 0.6 miles. Korea's Danuri orbiter imaged the crater with its high-resolution LUTI camera and sent the coordinates to the LRO team, and LRO captured its series of images while passing about 60 miles above the Moon, travelling 1 mile per second.

Nothing was aimed at the Moon. A stage that has just thrown a lander onto a translunar trajectory retains almost all of that energy, and once the payload separates it has no mission, usually no usable propellant and no way to steer. What follows is a wandering orbit shaped by the Earth, the Moon and the Sun, and sooner or later such a path can intersect the lunar surface. There is no atmosphere to burn the hardware up and no ocean to swallow it, so the arrival leaves a permanent mark.

The question is often really about March 2022, when an object catalogued as WE0913A struck near Hertzsprung crater and left a double crater: an 18-metre pit superimposed on a 16-metre one, unlike any previous rocket impact. It was first believed to be an errant Falcon 9 booster from a 2015 launch. Trajectory tracking and spectroscopy by a University of Arizona team then showed it was the third stage of a Long March 3C from China's 2014 Chang'e 5-T1 mission, apparently carrying undeclared mass at its nose.