Russia\u2019s first moon mission in 47 years failed when its Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and crashed into the moon after a problem preparing for pre-landing orbit, underscoring the post-Soviet decline of a once mighty space programme.<\/p>\n
Russia\u2019s state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it had lost contact with the craft at 11:57 GMT on Saturday after a problem as the craft was shunted into pre-landing orbit. A soft landing had been planned for Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon,\u201d Roskosmos said in a statement.<\/p>\n
It said a special inter-departmental commission had been formed to investigate the reasons behind the loss of the Luna-25 craft, whose mission had raised hopes in Moscow that Russia was returning to the big power moon race.<\/p>\n
The failure underscored the decline of Russia\u2019s space power since the glory days of Cold War competition when Moscow was the first to launch a satellite to orbit the Earth \u2013 Sputnik 1, in 1957 \u2013 and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space in 1961.<\/p>\n
It also comes as Russia\u2019s $2 trillion economy faces its biggest external challenge for decades: the pressure of both Western sanctions and fighting the biggest land war in Europe since World War Two.<\/p>\n
Russia has not attempted a moon mission since Luna-24 in 1976, when Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Kremlin.<\/p>\n
Russia has been racing against India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to land on the moon\u2019s south pole this week, and more broadly against China and the United States which both have advanced lunar ambitions.<\/p>\n
\u201cIndia\u2019s Chandrayaan-3 is set to land on the moon on August 23,\u201d the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) posted on X, formerly Twitter, around the time news of the Luna crash broke.<\/p>\n
FAILED MOONSHOT<\/strong><\/p>\n Russian officials had hoped that the Luna-25 mission would show Russia can compete with the superpowers in space despite its post-Soviet decline and the vast cost of the Ukraine war.<\/p>\n \u201cThe flight control system was a vulnerable area, which had to go through many fixes,\u201d said Anatoly Zak, the creator and publisher of www.RussianSpaceWeb.com which tracks Russian space programmes.<\/p>\n Zak said Russia had also gone for the much more ambitious moon landing before undertaking a simpler orbital mission \u2013 the usual practice for the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India.<\/p>\n More than a decade ago, the failure of the 2011 Fobos-Grunt mission to one of the moons of Mars underscored the challenges facing Russia\u2019s space programme: it could not even exit the earth\u2019s orbit and fell back to earth, smashing into the Pacific Ocean in 2012.<\/p>\n Eventually, in the early 2010s, Russia settled upon the idea of the Luna-25 mission to the south pole of the moon. Luna-25 did manage to exit the earth\u2019s orbit.<\/p>\n But its failure means that Russia may not be the first to sample the frozen water which scientists believe the south pole of the moon holds.<\/p>\n It was not immediately unclear what long-term impact the failed mission would have on the country\u2019s moon programme, which envisages several more missions over coming years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Russia\u2019s first moon mission in 47 years failed when its Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and crashed into the moon after a problem preparing for pre-landing orbit, underscoring the post-Soviet decline of a once mighty space programme. Russia\u2019s state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it had lost contact with the craft at 11:57 GMT […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":18760,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,3],"tags":[532],"class_list":["post-18759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","category-world","tag-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}