The first images of the impact crater caused by an out-of-control SpaceX craft have emerged. Part of a SpaceX rocket crashed into the moon at about 8700 kilometres per hour on 5 August.

The images were taken by the Danuri lunar orbiter, operated by the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA). They show both before and after the impact and reveal that the crash did indeed leave a crater.

The craft in question was the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched in January last year, carrying the Hakuto-R spacecraft from commercial company ispace – which, ironically, also crashed into the moon during an unsuccessful landing attempt.

Astronomers around the world had trained their telescopes on the spot in the hope of observing the impact, but its tiny size made it virtually impossible for amateur observers to make out.

KASA revealed the images and warned that videos being shared on social media purporting to show footage of the impact are fake.

It is thought that the almost 14-metre-long, 4000-kilogram Falcon upper stage impacted the moon at 5.35am BST on 5 August, near to Einstein crater – named for physicist Albert Einstein – which is towards the edge of the visible moon from Earth.

NASA had predicted prior to impact that the crash would create a crater 18 metres wide and 4 metres deep. Further images from a NASA lunar orbiter will provide more detail of the site in the coming days and weeks.

at the Open University, UK, says the images make it hard to be certain about the nature of the crater, but that higher-quality ones should emerge in time.

“The moon’s got about 100 million natural craters in that size range, so in the scheme of things, this is nothing,” he says. “You’ll get several a decade of this kind of size forming naturally.”

Unlike the Apollo lander sites, which have been photographed in great detail, the SpaceX impact site may not show any visible evidence of the craft because of its high impact speed, says Rothery. But the ejected regolith will probably be lighter in colour than the surrounding surface, at least until it is weathered by sunlight over tens of millions of years.

Some had suggested in the wake of the impact that the new crater be named after SpaceX owner Elon Musk, but the suggestion has been shot down by astronomers.

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, chair of the International Astronomical Union Working Group on Planetary System Nomenclature, which oversees the naming of celestial objects and features, says it wouldn’t be in line with rules on such matters.

“Formal feature naming is restricted to natural geological formations that serve a long-term cartographic and scientific reference purpose for the global community,” she says. “Spacecraft impact sites are frequently given informal or working nicknames by mission teams. The [SpaceX] mission team can give it any nickname they like, but it will not become an official name.”

Furthermore, if a crater is named to commemorate a person, this person has to have been deceased for at least three years, says Schulz, while Musk is still alive.

Part of a discarded SpaceX rocket is believed to have crashed into the moon at 8700 kilometres per hour earlier this morning. Astronomers around the world trained their telescopes on the predicted site of the impact in the hope of capturing images and eking some useful science out of the accidental collision.

The craft is the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched in January last year carrying the Hakuto-R spacecraft from commercial company ispace – which, ironically, also crashed into the moon during an unsuccessful landing attempt.

It is thought that the almost 14-metre-long, 4000-kilogram Falcon upper stage impacted the moon at 5.35am BST today. The crash was predicted to occur close to Einstein crater, which would place it towards the edge of the visible moon from Earth.

at the University of Leicester, UK, says that telescopes around the world were trained on the site of the impact and that images of the area before and after impact will emerge soon. Lunar orbiters from South Korea and the US will also observe the impact site.

NASA predicts that the impact will have created a crater that is 18 metres wide and 4 metres deep.

“It is not a good thing to be randomly sending debris into the moon,” says Sargeant. “It’s not something we should be making a habit of. What if it hit a site of special interest? What if it caused damage to the historical Apollo landers?”

Both NASA and the European Space Agency are required to take the end of a spacecraft’s life into account before a mission launches, ensuring that there is a plan and enough fuel to safely deorbit it. Commercial companies aren’t covered by the same rules, says Sargeant, although efforts to introduce such requirements are under way.

When SpaceX launched the Falcon in question, the heavy payload required more thrust than usual, meaning that the rocket ended up floating uncontrollably in space. It eventually fell into an orbit that unintentionally put it on a collision course with the moon.

But Sargeant says that some science can be salvaged from the event, with astronomers likely to capture rare images of a moon crater being created and the lunar regolith plumes ejected from the impact.

at the Macau University of Science and Technology, China, says that all planetary surfaces should ideally be kept as pristine as is feasible – without hindering exploration – but that the moon has already been impacted by decades of US, Soviet and Russian, Chinese, Indian, Israeli and other nations’ missions, as well as millions of years of asteroid impacts.

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“Rockets have been landing, crashing and taking off from the surface for decades now,” says Bugiolacchi. A controlled crash may even be welcomed by planetary scientists, he says. “Knowing the projectile’s mass, impact velocity, angle and trajectory provide invaluable data on surface evolution. The primary agent shaping most planetary surfaces is high-velocity impacts. Normally, these events are entirely random in terms of physical properties and dynamics.”

“The moon already has about 100 million natural impact craters of the size expected to be made by this crash, so such a crash will hardly make a difference,” says at the Open University, UK. “I’d be happy with a deliberate collision into the moon if it were done with a science aim and was set up so as to be studied to learn about the moon’s interior or surface composition. However, this crash is accidental and reckless.”

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SpaceX launched its secretive Starfall delivery today, which saw a demo capsule blast off to low Earth orbit. There are few details about the launch or a future service, but SpaceX has previously said Starfall will enable cargo delivery from space, such as for manufactured materials in low Earth orbit like pharmaceutical compounds or semiconductor alloys.

The Starfall capsule took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at around 6.50am local time (1152 BST) this morning, riding on a Falcon 9 rocket, which later landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

What will Starfall do?

SpaceX hasn’t revealed much publicly about Starfall, but an assessment published by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) showed that the project’s purpose was for the “transport and delivery of goods through space”. SpaceX has said that the mission will allow for “routine access to the microgravity environment for scientific research and in-space manufacturing”. The FAA assessment also showed that two associated re-entry vehicle landings were approved for this demonstration mission.

Unlike SpaceX’s spacecraft that ferry human passengers to the International Space Station, the vehicle for Starfall is designed for cargo only. It is a windowless, black, stumpy cylinder, measuring around 3 metres across and less than a metre tall, and has capacity for a 1-tonne payload. The capsule is split into two parts that are designed to separate after re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere: an upper dish where the payload is stored, and a heat shield made from carbon fibre beneath it, which also has compressed gas that can be used to manoeuvre the cargo safely to Earth.

What happened during the launch?

After the Falcon 9 rocket took off, the booster successfully landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean. However, SpaceX has provided no further updates about the Starfall capsule in space, such as how long it will remain in orbit before it aims to splash down in the Pacific Ocean 1300 kilometres from the Californian coast.

Is SpaceX the only company doing this?

There are much smaller companies that are seeking to manufacture materials in low Earth orbit, such as the US firm Varda Space Industries (VSI), which aims to make pharmaceuticals in orbit before flying them back to Earth, or the Welsh company Space Forge, which hopes to make semiconductors and alloys in low Earth orbit. Both firms hope that producing materials in low-gravity environments will free them from the defects and structural deformities that can form as a result of Earth’s gravity, such as when heavier particles sink to the bottom of a liquid rather than distributing uniformly.

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These companies, however, operate at a much smaller scale than Starfall. VSI has flown six containers to orbit, but these are only around a metre wide and have a total weight of 300 kilograms, whereas Starfall is three times larger.

SpaceX has contracts with the US military, of which Starfall could play a part. The Pentagon has announced a project called Rocket Cargo, which would use SpaceX’s larger Starship rocket to deliver supplies to remote locations in under an hour, but Starfall could plug the gap for smaller deliveries. The US military has also signed contracts with other companies, such as Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and New Zealand-based Rocket Lab, to study the possibility of cargo delivery from space.

SpaceX will fly an extensively upgraded Starship next week that will – if it launches successfully – break records as the tallest and most powerful rocket in history. The flight will be watched keenly at NASA, as the craft is vital to its plans to put humans back on the moon in 2028.

Starship is made up of two parts: an upper stage, confusingly also called Starship, and a lower stage called Super Heavy. Since the last Starship test in October last year, SpaceX has been making extensive revisions to both stages.

The twelfth test flight, which is , will involve new version 3 models of both craft. Powering each stage will be version 3 Raptor engines, which have seen limited testing on previous flights, and the launch will take place from a newly designed pad at the company’s Starbase site in Texas, meaning that the stakes for the test are particularly high.

On Super Heavy 3, the number of grid fins, intended to steer it back through the atmosphere to a safe landing, has been reduced from four to three but their size is expanded by 50 per cent. Starship 3 has a new, larger propellant tank, equipment for in-orbit refuelling and improved heat-resistant tiles for atmospheric re-entry.

The total height of the rocket at launch will be 124 metres – about 1 metre taller than version 2 of Starship. Its height also surpasses the 98-metre-tall Space Launch System (SLS) rocket currently used by NASA and the 111-metre-tall Saturn V that sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 70s.

Starship 3 will also have 75,000 kilonewtons of thrust, which is almost twice the 39,000 kilonewtons of SLS, making it the most powerful rocket ever launched.

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at the University of Sheffield, UK, has calculated that the power of all the engines on the full Starship stack, at peak output, is larger than that produced by all electricity generation in Germany. “It’s massive,” says John.

Starship is being developed to put satellites in orbit and also ultimately to run missions to Mars, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. But it has also been selected by NASA as one of two commercial lander designs for its Artemis programme to return humans to the moon, alongside a lander from Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin.

After an uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022, the second Artemis flight earlier this year took four astronauts around the moon, further from Earth than any human has travelled before.

A recently released confirms that the Artemis III mission will see crew launch in an Orion spacecraft atop the SLS rocket into low Earth orbit and then rendezvous with “one or both commercial lunar landers provided by SpaceX and Blue Origin”. Such a manoeuvre will be needed to get crew and fuel aboard a lander ahead of a mission to land on the moon’s surface, with Artemis IV aiming to do this as early as 2028.

SpaceX is using a fail-fast, learn-fast strategy more common in Silicon Valley than the conservative world of space exploration. Out of the 11 previous test flights, there have been six successful flights and five failures. Neither SpaceX nor NASA responded to a request for comment.

at Kingston University London believes SpaceX is on track for the Artemis programme, despite previous failures. “Rocket science is difficult. It’s challenging. It’s complex,” says Shaw. “Can they do it? Yes. Can they do it within the timeline? There’s a lot to be quietly confident about. Even if you have another failure or two, or five… they’ll learn from it, they’ll iterate it and they’ll put a new system together.”

John says the upcoming Starship test will be important to verify the design of the version 3 craft that will form the basis of the the Human Lander System (HLS) that SpaceX intends to touch down on the moon. HLS will need significant alterations, such as different engines designed to touch down under the moon’s lower gravity, and no heat shield, as it will never have to withstand re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere.

“It’s in a way small, incremental improvements, but then also it’s by far the most significant version: this version 3 is what they need for the Artemis programme. The other ones have been prototypes,” says John. “Version 3 is really the first test of the production model. Now it’s just making it reliable.”

A SpaceX rocket that burned up after re-entering the atmosphere unleashed a plume of vaporised metals over Europe, a type of pollution that is expected to increase as spacecraft and satellites multiply.

The upper stage of a Falcon 9, which is designed to splash down in the Pacific Ocean for possible re-use, lost control due to engine failure and fell from orbit over the north Atlantic in February 2025.

People across Europe saw fiery debris streaking through the sky, some of which crashed behind a warehouse in Poland. Seeing the news, at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Germany and his colleagues turned on their lidar, an instrument for atmospheric sensing. Twenty hours later, it detected a 10-fold spike in lithium, a key component of rocket hulls, in the upper atmosphere as the plume of vaporised metal drifted over it.

Atmospheric modelling suggested this plume had drifted 1600 kilometres from the area where the Falcon 9 re-entered the atmosphere. The study is the first to trace high-altitude pollution to a specific spacecraft re-entry.

The tiny metal particles “could be catalysing ozone destruction, creating clouds in the stratosphere and mesosphere, affecting the way that sunlight travels through the atmosphere”, says Wing. “But all of this is understudied.”

Worries about this type of pollution are growing as commercial space launches skyrocket and companies expand their mega-constellations of satellites, like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Leo. About 14,500 satellites are already in orbit, and last month SpaceX applied to launch 1 million more for Elon Musk’s goal of creating orbital data centres to power artificial intelligence.

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To avoid a runaway cycle of collisions producing ever more space debris, satellites are typically allowed to fall and burn up at the end of their lifespan. Experts say the amount of space trash particles could grow by 50 times in the next decade and exceed 40 per cent of the mass that meteoroids currently bring into the atmosphere.

There is a misconception that space debris burns up in the atmosphere and disappears, says at Purdue University, Indiana, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Let’s tap the brakes here, and let’s really do some thorough analysis of what effect this material could have.”

The Falcon 9 plume contained an estimated 30 kilograms of lithium. But given the composition of the alloys in rocket hulls, it would have contained a far greater amount of aluminium.

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Vaporised aluminium reacts with atmospheric oxygen to form particles of aluminium oxide, which provide a surface where chlorine compounds can more easily break down. The chlorine radicals freed by this process react with and destroy ozone molecules in the stratosphere.

Researchers estimate that spacecraft burn-up is 1000 tonnes of aluminium oxide into the atmosphere each year and growing. This threatens to expand the southern hemisphere’s ozone hole, which has been shrinking as countries phase out ozone-depleting refrigerant gases. The loss of ozone could allow in more of the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which cause skin cancer.

“In terms of metals, we’re sort of moving into this new paradigm where the upper atmosphere is increasingly more influenced by anthropogenic pollution than natural sources,” says at University College London. “Space debris is starting to undo the progress with the ozone hole.”

The metal oxide particles can also serve as nuclei upon which water vapour can condense into droplets, forming cirrus clouds in the upper troposphere, which tend to trap heat.

Scientists have measured particles from burned-up spacecraft in cirrus clouds. If they are encouraging cirrus cloud formation, it could worsen global warming, although this impact would still be small compared with that of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

“There is a lot of scientific evidence that this material could be having deleterious effects on our atmosphere, and now it’s on us as scientists to figure out if those effects are taking place and how bad are they,” says Cziczo.

There may be solutions, such as building satellites out of materials like wood — although that could still release black carbon soot upon re-entry — or retiring more of them to high-altitude “graveyard orbits”.

“We need to take a little bit of time and think about what we’re doing before we do it,” says Wing. “This explosion of satellites… it’s very fast, and we don’t know the consequences.”