The SpaceX Falcon Lunar Crash Is a Warning for Moon Bases - WIRED

A SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage, adrift for roughly 18 months after delivering a pair of lunar landers, is set to crash into the moon on Wednesday, generating a debris cloud potentially observable from Earth.
The rocket lacked the fuel to return to Earth or reach a stable orbit; weighing 4 metric tons, it will strike at about 5,400 mph—roughly seven times the speed of sound.
Because the moon has no atmosphere, the collision is expected to release energy equivalent to 3 metric tons of TNT, carving a crater up to 27 meters wide and 5 meters deep near Einstein Crater on the western edge of the near side.
Impact is anticipated around 6:34 am UTC, with the Americas offering the best vantage point; the plume won't be visible to the naked eye but could be seen through a good telescope for a few minutes.
This is not the first such event—a Chinese Long March 3C rocket hit the moon in March 2022, leaving a 29-meter crater—and experts warn that increasing lunar missions raise the risk of more debris strikes.
Bill Gray of the Project Pluto initiative first calculated the trajectory and contributed to a recent preprint study, which frames the crash as a chance to test seismic detection and assess hazards to future lunar bases and astronauts, relevant as NASA's Artemis program plans early facility-building missions.