A SpaceX rocket on a collision course with the moon is capturing the attention of Manitoba astronomers and stargazers alike. “You usually wouldn’t crash something big and expensive into the moon on purpose like that,” said Scott Young, a planetarium astronomer with the Manitoba Museum. The Falcon 9 rocket was originally launched into space in January 2025, carrying two lunar landers. While the booster used for liftoff later returned to Earth, the rocket’s second stage helped propel the lunar landers toward the moon. That abandoned segment eventually ran out of fuel and drifted off course — not the original plan for SpaceX. Thousands are expected to watch the collision, set for early Wednesday morning at approximately 1:35 a.m., through high-powered telescopic lenses. Young said the crash offers a chance to study its scientific impact. “How the rocks fly out, how big the dust cloud is,” Young said. “All of the details of that explosion will actually tell us a lot about what the surface of the moon is like.” The impact will also scatter debris into space — a prospect that worries scientists like Ed Cloutis, from the University of Winnipeg’s geography department. “It’s kind of a wild west up there, there’s nobody looking after the space environment,” Cloutis said on Tuesday. Cloutis, who helps build satellites in the city, said the more material orbiting Earth, the greater the risk to future satellite and rocket launches. “What’s called the Kessler Syndrome, which means you have a couple of collisions and that creates debris and then that debris will hit other things in orbit and you create this growing mass of debris,” Cloutis said. For astronomy enthusiast Kenton Dyck, who manages the Pembina Valley Astro Club in the Morden and Winkler area, the collision is a double-edged sword. On one hand, he’ll be watching through his lens with curiosity. “We are going to be disposing of it in the most spectacular fashion I can think of,” Dyck said. On the other hand, he said the growing amount of space debris is making his hobby — photographing the night sky — increasingly difficult. “The amount of work that it takes can be complicated by the fact that we have all of this stuff constantly streaking through every which way,” Dyck said. With files from CTV’s Alex Arsenych
