All eyes now turn to India
, departed from trajectory towards its landing site, not far from the Moon’s south pole. The result was what’s chief called “a hard landing”—one sufficiently hard for the probe to have never been heard from again. This April a mission by ispace, a Japanese company, ended shortly after thewhile still 5km above it, and turned off its engines. The Moon’s gravity is weaker than the Earth’s, but not by so much that a spacecraft can weather a fall from that distance.
On the morning of August 20th Russia announced that it had joined the ranks of the new crater-makers. Itsmission, launched on August 11th, entered orbit around the Moon on August 16th. It was due to undertake its landing five days later. But on August 19th, just after its controllers had told it to adjust its orbit in preparation, contact with the probe was lost.
The Russian failure has to be seen as far more embarrassing than those that came before it. Though the Soviet Union, from which Russia’s space programme derives, never landed people on the Moon, as America did, it was capable of mounting sophisticated missions involving long-duration rovers and rockets that would return samples of the lunar surface to Earth.
Nor is this a one-off. Russia has failed to mount any successful missions beyond Earth’s orbit since the fall of the Soviet Union. Its space programme has other problems, too. Long a supplier of relatively cheap, reliable launches for commercial satellites, Russia struggled to compete with the rise of SpaceX and its highly dependable, reusable rockets even before its invasion of Ukraine subjected it to international sanctions.
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