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. "It doesn't present any danger to anyone, though it ​does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of." Try again Cover image: © France 24 02:03A Chinese rocket stage crashed into the moon in March 2022 after completing a lunar test mission. In 2009, ​NASA intentionally crashed a rocket stage into the moon to study the plume of lunar material kicked up by the impact. NASA intentionally crashed stages from its Saturn V moon rocket into the moon in the 1970s to study the impacts' seismic effects.