NASA Images Show Moon Crater From SpaceX Rocket Impact
The Falcon rocket's upper stage struck the moon on Aug. 5, leaving a crater photographed by spacecraft.
The upper stage of a Falcon rocket plowed into the moon at 5,400 mph on Aug. 5, according to nbcdfw.com. The stage had been drifting through space for more than a year after launching a pair of private moon landers with experiments and a tiny rover in 2025 as part of NASA's push to commercialize lunar exploration.
Scientists say the fresh crater appears to be 60 feet across and less than 10 feet deep. The spacecraft photographed the crater a week after the collision from 60 miles (96 kilometers) up, while zooming along at one mile per second. South Korea's Danuri spacecraft was first on the scene to beam back photos, nbcdfw.com reported.
The event is still developing, and the investigation is ongoing.
Was this report accurate and useful?
Sources
Revision history
- Version 127 Aug 2026, 22:16current
First published.
How we work
This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.
Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.
Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.
None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.