Smithsonian Magazine, August 2026
Something is about to smack into the moon—and no, it’s not asteroid 2024 YR4. It’s a part of a SpaceX rocket. And while the impact won’t directly cause harm to humans, the unintended event highlights the increasing amount of space debris cluttering Earth’s orbit. The lunar impact was revealed by Bill Gray, the independent astrodynamicist and software developer behind Project Pluto, which supplies computer programs to astronomers. Last fall, his software for tracking orbits predicted that SpaceX’s junk would hit the moon on August 5, 2026, according to a statement. With more recent data, he estimates that the impact will happen around 2:35 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time.
“This may be of some (probably minor) scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it. 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,” Gray writes in the statement. Though debris close to Earth is tracked by some governmental agencies, space junk near the moon is tougher to trace, Marco Langbroek, a satellite tracking expert at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, tells Sky & Telescope’s David Dickinson. “There currently is no dedicated tracking network for these objects: All tracking data comes from chance detections by near-Earth asteroid surveys.” And even those surprise detections can be lost.
