Elon Musk shared a viral video purporting to capture the exact moment a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket collided with the moon.
STARBASE, TEXAS: Following an incident where a fragment of an Elon Musk-owned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket struck the moon, footage claiming to show the impact spread rapidly across social media. While many users accepted the video as genuine, widespread skepticism sparked the need for a thorough fact-check.
Claim: Viral video captures the SpaceX Falcon 9 crashing into the Moon
The controversial clip surfaced on X earlier this month alongside the assertion that it recorded the precise collision of the Falcon 9.
Accompanying the footage was the caption, “NEW: A SpaceX rocket has crashed into the Moon, leaving a 100-foot crater.”
After being posted by Musk, the video circulated widely across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, quickly accumulating over a million views.
While numerous commenters treated the footage as authentic, others labeled it a fabrication and demanded verification.
Fact Check: False; no satellites recorded the lunar impact directly
Ultimately, the video is false and does not show the actual Falcon 9 lunar impact, which occurred on August 5. Even though the Tesla billionaire initially posted the footage, he later acknowledged that it was not real.
The European Space Agency confirmed on the day of the event that “the discarded upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket impacted on the Moon,” but no satellites captured live footage of the predicted collision.
During an August 3 press conference, Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA Science and Dragon Programs at SpaceX, explained that a combination of gravitational forces and solar activity directed the remaining hardware toward a lunar trajectory.
Benjamin Fernando of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico also verified to AFP that the impact indeed happened on August 5.
Although multiple online observers suspected the video was generated by artificial intelligence, standard AI detection programs could not verify any digital manipulation or locate a SynthID watermark.
The backstory of the Falcon 9 upper stage
The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on August 1, 2025, transporting two lunar landers to orbit using its upper stage. SpaceX addressed the situation in a statement on X, noting, “For most of our missions, we plan a controlled deorbit of the Falcon second stage so it safely reenters over the ocean.”
The company added, “For higher energy missions like those to a lunar transfer orbit, nearly all performance on the vehicle is devoted to successfully placing the payload in the intended orbit, and a controlled disposal maneuver is not always possible.”