00:00A SpaceX rocket is crashing into the moon, and the wild part isn't the crash,
00:04it's that nobody was watching it until an amateur caught it.
00:07Here's what's happening.
00:08SpaceX launched two landers toward the moon in January 2025.
00:12The Falcon 9 upper stage pushed them out, then got left behind.
00:16Nobody brought it down, nobody steered it anywhere.
00:19It's been looping around Earth ever since.
00:22Four tons of dead rocket moving at 5,000 miles an hour,
00:26now on a path to hit the moon.
00:28And no space agency caught this.
00:30Bill Gray, an independent astronomer who builds his own orbit tracking software,
00:34ran the numbers back in September and found the rocket crosses the moon's path.
00:39He was the first to calculate it, and he's tracked it ever since.
00:42Scientists are now watching closely because they rarely get an impact
00:45where they already know exactly what's hitting and how fast.
00:48Ben Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory told NPR the debris moves at multiple miles per second
00:54and, quote, poses a risk to astronauts, future lunar habitats, and infrastructure.
00:59So if a hobbyist is the one catching our leftover hardware before it hits,
01:03who's actually tracking everything we've left in orbit?
01:06Drop your take in the comments.
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