A Russian robotic spacecraft en route to the lunar surface crashed on the moon, Russia’s space agency said Sunday, citing the results of a preliminary investigation a day after it lost contact with the vehicle.
It’s the latest setback in spaceflight for a country that during the Cold War became the first country, as the Soviet Union, to put a satellite, a man and then a woman, into orbit.
The Luna-25 lander, Russia’s first lunar space launch since the 1970s, entered lunar orbit on Wednesday and was due to land on Monday. On Saturday afternoon Moscow time, according to Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, the spacecraft received orders to enter an orbit that would set it up for a lunar landing. But an inexplicable “emergency situation” occurred, and the orbital adjustment did not occur.
On Sunday, Roscosmos said that measures to locate and re-establish contact with the aircraft had failed, and that it calculated the failure of the configuration meant that Luna-25 deviated from its planned orbit and “stopped its existence as the result of a collision with the surface of the moon.”
An interagency commission will be formed to investigate the reasons for the failure, it added.
Luna-25, launched on August 11, aims to be the first mission to reach the moon’s south polar region. Government space programs and private companies around Earth are interested in that part of the moon because they believe it may contain water ice that astronauts could use for future space missions.
Another country, India, will now have the chance to land the first probe around the lunar south pole. Its Chandrayaan-3 mission was launched in July, but it opted for a more circuitous but fuel-efficient route to the moon. It is scheduled to attempt a landing on Wednesday.
That India could succeed after Russia failed is a blow to President Vladimir V. Putin, who has used Russia’s successes in space as part and parcel of his hold on power.
That is part of the Kremlin’s narrative — a compelling one for many Russians — that Russia is a great nation held back by an American-led West that is jealous of and threatened by Russia’s capabilities. The state-run space industry in particular has become an important tool as Russia strives to remake its geopolitical relationships.
“The interest in our proposals is very high,” the head of Russia’s space program, Yuri Borisov, told Mr. Putin in a televised meeting in June, outlining Russia’s plan to expand cooperation in space. in African countries. The initiative is part of the Kremlin’s overall effort to deepen economic and political ties with non-Western countries amid European and American sanctions.
Interest in the Luna-25 mission within Russia itself seems muted. The flight took off from a remote spaceport in Vostochny in the country’s Far East at a time when most Russians, who live in the west of the country, are likely to be sleeping. The progress of the mission to the moon is not a major topic in the state media.
In recent decades, Russian exploration of Earth’s solar system has fallen far from its Soviet-era heights.
The last unqualified victory was more than 35 years ago, when the Soviet Union was still intact. A pair of twin spacecraft, Vega 1 and Vega 2, were launched six days apart. Six months later, two spacecraft flew by Venus, each dropping a capsule containing a lander that successfully landed on the surface of the hellish planet, as well as a balloon that, when released, floated away. in the atmosphere. In March 1986, two spacecraft passed within about 5,000 miles of Halley’s comet, taking pictures and studying the dust and gas from the comet’s nucleus.
Subsequent Mars missions launched in 1988 and 1996 failed.
The embarrassing nadir came in 2011 with Phobos-Grunt, which was supposed to land on Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, and return rock and dirt samples to Earth. But Phobos-Grunt never made it out of Earth’s orbit after the engines that would send it to Mars failed to fire. A few months later, it burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.
An investigation later revealed that the Russian space agency had skimped on manufacturing and testing, using electronics components that had not yet been proven to survive the cold and radiation of space.
Otherwise, Russia is confined to low-Earth orbit, including transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station, which it jointly manages with NASA.
Luna-25 completed a one-year mission studying the composition of the lunar surface. It is also supposed to have demonstrated technologies that will be used in a series of robotic missions that Russia plans to launch on the moon to lay the groundwork for a future lunar base it plans to build with China.
But the schedule for those missions — Luna 26, 27 and 28 — has slipped years from the original timetable, and now there are likely to be further delays, especially as the Russian space program struggles, to financial and technological, because of the sanctions imposed afterwards. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Although NASA and the European Space Agency continue to work with Russia on the International Space Station, other joint space projects ended after the invasion of Ukraine. For moon missions, that means Russia will have to replace key components that will come from Europe, including a drill for the Luna-27 lander.
Russia has struggled to develop new space hardware, especially electronics that work reliably in the harsh conditions of outer space.
“You can’t really fly in space, or, at least, fly in space for a long time, without better electronics,” said Anatoly Zak, who published RussianSpaceWeb.com, which tracks Russia’s space activities. “Soviet electronics have always been behind. They have always been behind the West in this field of science and technology.”
He added: “The entire Russian space program is really affected by this issue.”
Other ambitious Russian space plans are also behind schedule and will likely take longer than official statements to complete.
The Angara, a family of rockets that has been in development for two decades, has only been launched six times.
A few days ago, Vladimir Kozhevnikov, the chief designer for Russia’s next space station, told the Interfax news agency Oryol, a modern replacement for the venerable Soyuz capsule, will make its first flight in 2028.
In 2020, Dmitry Rogozin, then head of Roscosmos, said that Oryol’s first flight would take place in 2023 — meaning that in just three years, the launch date would drop by five years.
Landing on the moon is tricky, and China is the only country to have done it successfully this century — three times, most recently in December 2020. Three other missions have crash-landed in recent years, most recently an attempt by Ispace , a Japanese company. Its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander crashed in April when a software glitch led the vehicle to misjudge its altitude.
