Roskosmos<\/a>, 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\n\n\n“The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon,” Roskosmos said in a statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\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\n\n\n
The failure underscored the decline of Russia’s space power since the glory days of Cold War competition when Moscow was the first to launch a satellite to orbit the Earth – Sputnik 1, in 1957 – and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space in 1961.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It also comes as Russia’s $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\n\n\n
Though moon missions are fiendishly difficult, and many U.S. and Soviet attempts have failed, Russia had not attempted a moon mission since Luna-24 in 1976, when Communist leader Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Kremlin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Russian state television put news of the loss of Luna-25 at number 8 in its line up at noon and gave it just 26 seconds of coverage, after a news about fires on Tenerife and a 4 minute item about a professional holiday for Russian pilots and crews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
FAILED MOONSHOT<\/strong>
Russia has been racing against India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to land on the moon’s south pole this week, and more broadly against China and the United States which both have advanced lunar ambitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAs news of the Luna-25 failure broke, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) posted on X, formerly Twitter, that Chandrayaan-3 was set to land on Aug. 23.<\/p>\n\n\n\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\n\n\n
“The flight control system was a vulnerable area, which had to go through many fixes,” said Anatoly Zak, the creator and publisher of www.RussianSpaceWeb.com which tracks Russian space programmes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zak said Russia had also gone for the much more ambitious moon landing before undertaking a simpler orbital mission – the usual practice for the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While Luna-25 went beyond the earth’s orbit – unlike the failed 2011 Fobos-Grunt mission to one of the moons of Mars – the crash could impact Russia’s moon programme, which envisages several more missions over coming years including a possible joint effort with China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Russian scientists have repeatedly complained that the space programme has been weakened by poor managers who are keen for unrealistic vanity space projects, corruption and a decline in the rigour of Russia’s post-Soviet scientific education system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“It is so sad that it was not possible to land the apparatus,” said Mikhail Marov, a leading Soviet physicist and astronomer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Marov, 90, was hospitalised in Moscow after news of the failure of Luna-25 was announced, although details of what he was ill with were not available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Marov told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper that he hoped the reasons behind the crash would be discussed and examined rigorously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“This was perhaps the last hope for me to see a revival of our lunar program,” he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Source: Reuters<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More stories here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia’s 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’s state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it had lost contact with the craft at 11:57 GMT […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":294706,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23,25],"tags":[18929,18928,3838,18927],"class_list":["post-294705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","category-news","tag-luna-25","tag-moon","tag-russia","tag-spacecraft"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/russia-spacecraft-jpg.webp?fit=1600%2C900&ssl=1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294705"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":294707,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294705\/revisions\/294707"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbcghanaonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}