Musk Shared It. Musk Denied It. Almost Nobody Saw The Denial

A video claiming to show SpaceX’ Falcon 9 rocket crashing into the Moon has been circulating on social media for the past several days. The clip shows a small object slamming into the lunar surface, triggering a fiery explosion on impact. But an investigation by OBC has found that the story behind the video simply isn’t true.

What Actually Happened

On August 5 this year, at around noon, a rocket belonging to the American private spaceflight company SpaceX did strike the Moon. The vehicle involved was a Falcon 9 rocket that had launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on January 15, 2025. NASA has confirmed that the roughly 4,000-tonne stage carved out a crater on the lunar surface measuring 60 to 100 feet across and about 12 feet deep. It is this real event that the viral video claims to depict.

Tracing the Video’s Origins

The clip was first spotted on an Instagram account called ‘goodness__news’. Posted on August 8, it had already racked up nearly 5,000 views on Instagram by August 14. The caption claimed: “SpaceX rocket fragment creates massive crater on the Moon. Rare footage captured by South Korea’s ‘Danuri’” The accompanying description repeated the claim that the images were captured by South Korea’s Danuri spacecraft.

A keyword search on Facebook turned up the same video shared by an account called ‘Prime News Kerala’, posted on August 7 and viewed more than 2,000 times, captioned “SpaceX rocket crashes into the Moon.” Numerous other Facebook pages and accounts – most of them pages that regularly post news-style content – shared the same video with similar captions on August 7 and 8.

Notably, an Instagram account called ‘blocksinfo’ also posted the video on August 7 – but unlike the other posts, this one carried a small on-screen label reading “Simulated Video.” That post alone has been viewed 550,000 times.

No Trace in Mainstream Coverage

Plenty of legitimate news reports did cover the Falcon 9’s lunar impact. But not a single mainstream news outlet used the viral video or its screenshots to illustrate the story – including NASA’s own official statement. One Malayalam outlet, Deshabhimani, did use a screenshot from the video in its coverage of the impact, but its report explicitly noted that the visuals were simulated.

Meanwhile, the version shared by ‘goodness__news’ had been doctored further: it spliced in other images, edited to look like the crater formed by the impact. Those particular images, it turns out, were genuine – originally shared by the international news agency Reuters, and they do show the actual crater the Falcon 9 left on the Moon. In other words, the fabricated video was built by stitching authentic photographs into a fictional simulation.

The Trail Leads to a Six-Figure Account — and Then to Musk

A reverse image search traced the video further back to an X account called ‘Valuetainment’, a well-known US-based digital media network. It had posted the clip on the night of August 5 at 10:20 p.m. — just hours after the real Falcon 9 impact — with the caption: “A SpaceX rocket slammed into the Moon. The impact carved a 100-foot-deep crater into the lunar surface.” As of August 14, that post alone had been viewed more than 6 million times, and unlike the ‘blocksinfo’ version, it carried no disclaimer indicating the footage was simulated.

Valuetainment’s post was then reshared on X by none other than SpaceX’s own owner, Elon Musk, on the morning of August 6 — the day after the original video appeared. Musk’s repost has been viewed more than 8 million times. Between the two posts, the fake video reached over 10 million X accounts.

The Correction Nobody Saw

Hours later, Musk himself posted again on X to say the video was fake, writing simply: “But this was fake,” along with a joking emoji. That correction, however, was seen by only 710,000 profiles — meaning that while more than 10 million people saw the fabricated video, barely 7 percent of them ever saw the follow-up debunking it.

SpaceX itself has since confirmed that the footage was entirely simulated and that no spacecraft actually captured any such video of the impact. This clarification appears in the replies beneath both Musk’s post and Valuetainment’s original post.

The Bottom Line

The video claiming to show “Falcon 9 crashing into the Moon” is fake. And ironically, it may have spread as widely as it did precisely because Elon Musk — the owner of SpaceX — shared it himself, lending it an air of authenticity it never deserved.