South Korea’s space agency captures images of Elon Musk’s SpaceX crashing into Moon

South Korea’s space agency has captured the moment parts of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket unintentionally crashed into the Moon’s surface.

South Korea’s path finder Lunar orbiter Danuri captured the images after the impact, the country’s Korean AeroSpace Administration (KASA) announced, according to the BBC.

According to the space agency, the Moon was struck by rocket debris abound 6.35am GMT on Wednesday.

The school-bus-size object is in the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a lunar lander from Firefly Aerospace toward the Moon in January 2025.

The company also sent a pair of private lunar landers to the Moon last year. The upper stage from that launch of the Falcon 9 rocket is what crashed into the Moon at 5400 mph (8700 kph), placed on an accidental collision course by solar activity and gravity, according to SpaceX.

That’s the size of a five-storey building and weighs approximately 4000kg (630st) on Earth.

While the impact did not pose any danger to Earth, Matt Bothwell, astronomer at the University of Cambridge, raised concerns about space debris.

“Space is getting more and more crowded” as each year “we launch more stuff into space”, he said, according to the BBC.

“It could feasibly be within a few decades that it’s actually quite hard to get past Earth’s orbit because space is so crowded,” Mr Bothwell said.

This Falcon 9 blasted off from Florida, carrying two lunar landers into space, and was in orbit since January last year.

Its job was to fire the upper stage hard enough to send both of the landers out of Earth’s orbit and onto a path towards the Moon.

The strike on Wednesday occurred during daylight for many parts of the world, but its small flash would not have been bright enough to see through a telescope.

But it was reported that a telescope in Chile spotted what astronomers have identified as the debris plume resulting from the crash.

Space tracking experts said it was inevitable that the leftover rocket segment ploughed into the moon.

SpaceX’s collision is the latest instance of lunar litter, a problem that many fear could worsen as the United States and China race to put astronauts on the moon.

In 2022, a Chinese rocket unintentionally hit the moon following a lunar mission, and many more stray rocket pieces likely struck the moon in decades past without scientists’ knowledge.