The discarded upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched a pair of lunar landers in January 2025 crashed into the Moon at 5,400 mph on Wednesday, striking the lunar surface near the Einstein Crater after drifting through space for more than a year. The object that crashed into the Moon was an upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, weighing around four tonnes. While upper stages are typically designed to fall back into Earth's atmosphere and burn up during reentry or safely splash down in the ocean, SpaceX abandoned the Falcon 9's upper stage in space, causing it to drift for 18 months before crashing into the Moon. Despite there being around 130 million pieces of space junk orbiting Earth at 11,000 mph or faster, impacts are extremely rare. Remnants of a Chinese spacecraft crashed into the Moon in March 2022 after completing a lunar mission, while NASA intentionally crashed a rocket stage into the Moon in 2009 to study the lunar dust kicked up by the impact.