Russia Aims to Restore Prestige in Race to Moon’s South Pole
NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, plans a human spaceflight around the moon in late 2024 on a mission that would take people deep into space for the first time in decades and set the stage for a landing the agency would like to conduct with the American spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX in 2025. The stakes of the Luna-25 mission are especially high for Russia and President Vladimir Putin. The sanctions imposed since the war in Ukraine halted much of its collaboration with the U.S.
and European nations, impeding several missions and driving Russia closer to China as Beijing expands its own ambitions for space. “We are now likely witnessing the final chapter of significant cooperation between the United States and the Russian Federation in space," Benjamin L. Schmitt, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Physics and Astronomy, said in written comments.
“Sentiment in the scientific and astronaut communities has begun to shift toward the realization of a future in which NASA and Roscosmos are no longer close partners due to the horrific acts of the Putin regime in Ukraine and Russia’s hybrid threats against global democracies more broadly," he said. NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, have continued working together on crew launches to and operations of the International Space Station. India and more than two dozen other countries have agreed to U.S.-backed principles for space exploration, while Russia is collaborating with China in the International Lunar Research Station that plans to man a base on the moon by 2036.
Since 2011, China has been excluded by U.S. law from working with NASA. Putin, mindful of the pride Russia takes in its Soviet-era history of space
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