The crash of the Russian probe Luna 25, which was to land on Sunday August 20 near the South Pole of the Moon, is a blow for the Russian space sector. Beyond its scientific interest, the political challenge of this mission was to restore the image of the Roscosmos agency, by showing that despite the end of the USSR, budget cuts, ruptures in cooperation with Western agencies ( including NASA and Esa), and corruption scandals, Russia could still shine in space.
Instead, this crash due to engine failure, which ran for 127 seconds instead of 84 during the deorbit maneuver, appears to be yet another symptom of Moscow’s space tumble. Roscosmos director Yuri Borissov is aware of this: on Monday August 21, he declared that this disappointment was “mainly” due to the fact that Russia has “interrupted its lunar exploration program for almost fifty years”. .
Even if failure is an integral part of the conquest of space, the time when the Soviet Union had outdone the Americans for the putting into orbit of the first satellite – Sputnik (1957) –, of the first animal – the dog Laïka ( 1957) -, of the first man – Yuri Gagarin (1961) – then of the first woman – Valentina Tereshkova (1963) – seems very distant.
Worse, another machine, Indian for its part, is about to land on the moon and is also targeting the South Pole. Chandrayaan 3, launched on July 14 and arrived in lunar orbit on August 6, is to attempt to land a rover on August 23, at 2:34 p.m. Paris time (the moon landing is to be broadcast live on YouTube by the space agency Indian Isro). The South Pole is the object of all the attention, because it could contain reserves of icy water, essential for the lunar manned missions and, later, towards Mars, the Moon becoming a base of launching having the enormous advantage of its low gravity. Shipping resources produced on the Moon to the Red Planet would be much cheaper than sending them out of Earth’s gravity on rockets.
The technologies used for the Russian Luna 25 mission, so named to mark the continuity with the Soviet lunar missions stopped in 1976, have evolved only slightly. Without budgets and deprived of partnerships with other space agencies, Russian researchers and engineers, despite their world-renowned expertise, struggle to upgrade rockets, on-board computers, energy management equipment or even machine control software.
The average age of Russian engineers is also rising sharply. In November 2011, the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission, which was supposed to go to Mars, got stuck in Earth orbit and disintegrated in the atmosphere. These repeated failures are a bad signal for the entire Russian aerospace sector, including civil and military aeronautics, as the space “locomotive” is essential to ensure a sustained development of aviation.
