Nearly 9,000 kilometres per hour. That is how fast a dead piece of SpaceX rocket will hit the Moon on Wednesday, and the world’s planetary scientists have been busy for weeks preparing to watch, rather than dreading it. The object is the remains of a Falcon 9 upper stage, the part of a SpaceX rocket that does the final push to send a payload deep into space. This one did its job on January 15, 2025, releasing two robotic Moon landers, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and Japan’s ispace-built Resilience, before drifting away with nowhere to go. From then on nobody drove it anywhere.
