Russia’s first lunar mission in 47 years smashes into the Moon

Russia’s 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.

“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.

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.

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.

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 2.

Though Moon missions are fiendishly difficult, and many US 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.

Russian state television put news of the loss of Luna-25 at number eight in its line-up at noon and gave it just 26 seconds of coverage, after news about fires in Tenerife and a four-minute item about a professional holiday for Russian pilots and crews. 

Failed Moonshot