I’m at my desk with the news on mute, and a video autoplays showing a bright object streaking toward the moon, then a flash as a crater blows open on the surface. The caption says a SpaceX rocket just crashed into the moon and left a 100-foot crater, and Elon Musk himself reshared it.

I watched it twice, because I remembered hearing that a piece of an old SpaceX rocket really was on a crash course with the moon this month. But nothing about the footage looked like it came from an actual telescope, and a few minutes later I noticed Musk had posted again, this time calling his own repost "fake."

So I looked into it. Here’s what I found.

A Viral Video Claims to Show a SpaceX Rocket Crashing Into the Moon — Even Elon Musk Got Fooled

AI-GENERATED — The rocket really did hit the moon. No camera on Earth caught it happening like this.

On August 5, part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had been drifting in space since January 2025 crashed into the moon’s surface, just as scientists had predicted. The European Southern Observatory confirmed the impact using its Very Large Telescope, which picked up chemical traces of sodium and lithium in the days right after.

Within minutes, a video began spreading on X showing what looked like a close-up view of the crash itself, a bright object streaking across a black sky and slamming into the moon in a burst of light. One post captioned it "NEW: A SpaceX rocket has crashed into the Moon, leaving a 100 foot crater," and it raced across X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok in Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi. Elon Musk reshared the clip to his own account.

No telescope or satellite actually captured footage like this. NASA said beforehand it would try to observe the impact, but warned that weather and lighting might make it hard to see anything at all, and neither NASA nor any other space agency ever released video of the crash. A reverse image search on the clip led back to a more zoomed-out version of the same video posted back in April, months before the real crash even happened.

The video carried its own confession the whole time. X had already attached a "Made with AI" label directly to one of the most-shared posts, and a reply under another post said the clip was AI-generated to "provide visual context." Musk posted again after his original repost, admitting the footage was fake. The rocket crash was completely real. The dramatic video of it was not.