Russia’s moon failure dent to its space partnership with China
The crash of Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft into the moon over the weekend isn’t just a setback for President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to overcome war-related sanctions. It’s also an embarrassment for Chinese President Xi Jinping—Putin’s partner in building a proposed base on the moon meant to challenge the US and its space allies.
The Russian spacecraft was aiming to be the first to land near the south pole, the intended location of a joint base that space agencies in China and Russia announced in 2021 they had agreed to build together. Wu Yanhua, the chief designer of China’s major deep space exploration project, led a delegation to the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s far east to attend the launch and discuss deepening cooperation between the two countries’ space programmes, Chinese media reported earlier this month.
Now that the mission has ended in failure, Chinese media reports on the crash have been far and few between, with the official Xinhua news agency only carrying a terse five-sentence missive on Sunday. “This failure is expected to deal a blow to Russia’s ambitions," Hu Xijin, the former editor of the Communist Party-controlled Global Times, wrote in an opinion piece for the newspaper, adding that “the West should not underestimate Russia just because its lunar programme has failed".
Luna-25 was the first Russian spacecraft to attempt a moon landing since the end of the Soviet Union. “We will have to learn everything again," space historian Alexander Zheleznyakov told privately owned Russian media group RBC.
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