2023-08-21 17:45:00
“Interrupting it would be the worst decision to make,” said the director general of the Russian space agency interviewed by the television channel Rossiya 24, judging that on the contrary, Moscow should again “master all technologies”.
According to him, the first probe launched by Russia to the Moon since 1976 crashed on Sunday “mainly” because Russia “suspended its lunar exploration program for almost fifty years”.
“The invaluable experience accumulated by our predecessors in the 1960s and 1970s has practically been lost and the handover between generations has not taken place,” lamented Yuri Borissov.
Nearly fifty years after Moscow’s last successful lunar mission, the Luna-25 probe, weighing nearly 800 kilos, hit the lunar ground following an incident on Saturday during a maneuver prior to its landing on the moon.
This failure comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin has sworn that Moscow will do everything to keep its rank, taking as an example the sending by the USSR of the first man in space in 1961, in full escalation of East-West tensions.
He promised to continue the Russian space program despite funding problems, corruption scandals and Russian isolation due to the conflict in Ukraine.
Luna-25 took off on the night of August 10-11 from the Russian Far East. Its moon landing was scheduled for Monday on the lunar South Pole, which would have been a first, the machines landing so far in the equatorial zone.
Its mission, originally scheduled to last a year, was to collect and analyze soil samples.
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