Posted on 08/20/2023 4:44:52 AM PDT by marcusmaximus
Russia's first moon mission in 47 years failed after its Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and smashed into moon.
Russia's state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it had lost contact with the craft shortly after a problem occurred as the craft was shunted into pre-landing orbit on Saturday.
'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.
Moscow had earlier reported an 'abnormal situation' with the craft.
'During the operation, an abnormal situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the manoeuvre to be performed with the specified parameters,' the agency said in a statement.
Failure for the prestige mission underscores 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.
Russia has not attempted a moon mission since Luna-24 in 1976, when Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Kremlin.
Russian sources are already blaming endemic corruption inside the agency for the failure of the mission. Putin is expected to axe top space officials over the disaster.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
How’s the Ukraine space program doing?
What country are you from?
I can’t read Cyrillic.
What country are you a citizen of?
Are you paid to post here?
All that is left is a bunch of Chinese transistors and a whole bunch of “M&M Enterprises” dollars on the moon’s surface.
NASA’s double-secret, double-naught spies drilled a tiny hole in it, the same as they did to Soyuz and or all the crappy American ICs they extracted from washing machines and reused.
Disappointed. I remember Sputnik...I was 16.
Tell Putin to stop embarrassing himself.
Do you remember the Apollo missions?
We ourselves have had enough fatal and non-fatal incidents in the history of American spaceflight to not have room to gloat when it happens to other countries.
(And sometimes it doesn't even have to involve spaceflight. We're barely two years removed from NASA's experimental UAV crashing after takeoff for no apparent reason.)
Soviet propaganda is all that’s left for Ruzzia.
Of course there’s room to gloat everytime Putin fails to resurrect his twisted Soviet dreams.
Crash bang boom!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.