Monday, August 21, 2023

Schadenfreude at Russia's lunar failure

It's hard not to harbour a certain amount to schadenfreude at the failure of Russia's space ambitions. Their attempt to return to the Moon with the Luna 25 robotic spacecraft ended in ignominious failure, as the Russian space agency Roscosmos lost contact with the craft on Saturday afternoon and it crashed into the lunar surface, strewing yet more human garbage on an extraterrestrial body (India's Chandrayaan-2 mission crash-landed on the Moon in 2019).

The laconic and understated statement from Roscosmos - "The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon" - hides the enormity of the failure of Russia's first Moon mission in 47 years. It seems a long way from its Soviet glory days of the 1950s and 1960s, and the crash represents a catastrophic set-back for Russia's space ambitions. By some (Russian) estimates, the mission cost Russia about 6 billion rubles, and was 18 years in the making.

Maybe another country's failure might elicit at least some remorse, but Russia's current status as persona non grata and general global pariah means that most people probably welcomed the news with a wry smile (especially given that no human lives were lost).

Add to that the fact that the current race to the Moon (the USA, China and India all have missions underway, and even some private companies are looking to get in on the act) is not just the pure science/technology project - with a backdrop of Cold War geopolitical bragging rights - the 1960s space race was. 

This new rivalry is more of a gold rush than a space race: these countries are looking to harvest water from the lunar poles (for potential rocket fuel or even lunar manufacturing efforts in the future), and they are looking for valuable minerals for potential mining projects (even though we still haven't sorted out issues concerning lunar mining and drilling rights).

This makes it hard to get behind and cheer along like we did in the 1960s. It also makes failures less galling, and even maybe something to celebrate.

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