The school-bus-size object is the second stage of a SpaceX ‌Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a lunar lander from Firefly Aerospace toward the moon in January 2025. Advertisement AdvertisementAdvertisement AdvertisementWeighing 4 metric tons (4,000 kg), the rocket body slammed into the moon around 2:35 a.m. A Chinese rocket stage crashed into the moon in March 2022 after completing a ​lunar test mission. NASA intentionally crashed stages from its Saturn V moon ‌rocket into the moon in the 1970s to study the impacts' seismic effects. It would not want errant pieces ​of space junk impacting those assets.