How did Russia lose Lunar 25?

Russia's first lunar mission in 47 years failed when its Luna-25 spacecraft lost control and crashed on the moon after problems with preparations before landing in orbit.

Russia's state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it had lost contact with the spacecraft at 11:57 GMT on Saturday after a problem when the spacecraft drifted into pre-landing orbit. A soft landing had been planned for Monday.

"The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist due to a collision with the surface of the Moon," Roskosmos said in a statement.

He said a special interdepartmental commission was formed to investigate the reasons behind the loss of the Luna-25 spacecraft, whose mission had raised hopes in Moscow that Russia was returning to the high-powered lunar race.

The failure underscored the decline of Russia's space power since the heady days of the Cold War when Moscow first launched a satellite into Earth orbit, Sputnik 1, in 1957, and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel to space. In 1961.

It also comes as Russia's $2 trillion economy faces its biggest external challenge in decades: pressure from Western sanctions and the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II.

Although lunar missions are fiendishly difficult and many US and Soviet attempts have failed, Russia had not attempted a lunar mission since Luna-24 in 1976, when communist leader Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Kremlin.

Shot to the moon failed.

Russia has been competing 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 have advanced lunar ambitions.

When news of Luna-25's failure broke, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) posted on X, formerly Twitter, that Chandrayaan-3 would land on August 23.

Russian officials hoped the Luna-25 mission would prove that Russia could compete with the superpowers in space despite the post-Soviet collapse and the high cost of the Ukrainian war.

"The flight control system was a weak area that required a lot of precision," said Anatoly Zak, creator, and editor of www.RussianSpaceWeb.com, which tracks Russian space programs.

Zack said Russia had opted for a more ambitious moon landing before moving to a simpler orbital mission, standard practice for the Soviet Union, the United States, China, and India.

While Luna-25 did go beyond Earth's orbit, unlike the failed 2011 Phobos Grunt mission to one of Mars’s moons, the accident could affect Russia's lunar program, which envisions several more missions in the coming years, including a possible joint effort with China.

"It is very sad that it was not possible to land the apparatus," said Mikhail Marov, a leading Soviet physicist and astronomer.

Marov, 90, was hospitalized in Moscow after news of the Luna-25 failure was announced, although details about his illness were not available.

Marov told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper that he hoped the reasons behind the accident would be rigorously discussed and examined.

“This was perhaps the last hope for me to see a revival of our lunar program,” he said.