INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Russia&s first moon mission in 47 years failed when its Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and crashed into the moon after a problem
preparing for pre-landing orbit, underscoring the post-Soviet decline of a once mighty space programme.Russia&s state space corporation,
Roskosmos, said it had lost contact with the craft at 11:57 a.m
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 interdepartmental 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 Two.Russia had not attempted a moon mission since Luna-24 in 1976, when
Communist leader Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Kremlin.Russian officials had hoped that the Luna-25 mission would show Russia can compete with
the superpowers in space despite its post-Soviet decline and the vast cost of the Ukraine war.More than a decade ago, the failure of the
2011 Fobos-Grunt mission to one of the moons of Mars underscored the challenges facing Russia&s space programme: it could not even exit the
earth&s orbit and fell back to earth, smashing into the Pacific Ocean in 2012.Eventually, in the early 2010s, Russia settled upon the idea
of the Luna-25 mission to the south pole of the moon
Luna-25 did manage to exit the earth&s orbit.But its failure means that Russia may not be the first to sample the frozen water which
scientists believe the south pole of the moon holds.The post Russia&s first lunar mission in 47 years smashes into the moon in failure first
