Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft has crashed into the Moon after spinning into an uncontrolled orbit, officials say.
The unmanned craft was due to make a soft landing on the Moon’s south pole, but failed after encountering issues as it moved into its pre-landing orbit.
It was Russia’s first Moon mission in almost 50 years.
The spacecraft was scheduled to land on Monday to explore a part of the Moon which scientists think could hold frozen water and precious elements.
Roskosmos, Russia’s state space corporation, said it lost contact with the Luna-25 shortly after running into difficulties.
It’s not outlook, it’s reality. Russian leadership doesn’t have the will or incentive to expend billions launching dozens of missions to perfect the technology and learn from their mistakes like USSR did back in 60s (in fact USSR was launching them several times a year and there were many more Lunar missions them than official “24” number. Failures were simply not reported to the public like now).
They wanted a quick way to somewhat repair Russian patriots’ pride in their country by reminding them that Russia was “first in space” and so they are superior to the filthy westerners. That failed so they will just instruct propaganda machine to distract people with something else (plenty of that around) and move on.
In a decade or so there will be some other political cause to remember about space exploration and next mission will be funded. Of course there is no way to for engineers to learn from their mistakes and accumulate the necessary experience when it’s done this way.