Russia ups the ante in race to reach precious water on the Moon

Russia’s lunar lander blasts off on board a Soyuz-2.1b rocket booster and Fregat upper stage from the Vostochny cosmodrome (Picture: Reuters)

Russia launched its first Moon-landing spacecraft in 47 years today in a bid to be the first nation to make a soft landing on the lunar south pole – entering a new space race against India.

The region is believed to hold coveted pockets of ice, making it a potential source of water for a future long-term human presence.

The Russian lunar mission, the first since 1976, is racing against India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander, which launched last month, and more broadly with the United States and China, both of which have advanced lunar exploration programmes targeting the lunar south pole.

A Soyuz 2.1 rocket carrying the Luna-25 craft blasted off from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles east of Moscow, at 2.11am on Friday Moscow time – 12.11am BST.

The lander was boosted out of Earth’s orbit toward the Moon over an hour later, at which point mission control took command of the craft, Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said.

The lander is expected to touch down on the moon on August 21, Russia’s space chief Yuri Borisov told state television, two days earlier than the initial projected landing date of August 23.

The mission is due to land on the Moon on August 21 (Picture: Reuters)

‘Now we will wait for the 21st,’ Mr Borisov told workers at the Vostochny cosmodrome after the launch. ‘I hope that a highly precise soft landing on the Moon will take place.

‘We hope to be first.’

Luna-25, roughly the size of a small car, will aim to operate for a year on the Moon’s south pole, where scientists at Nasa and other space agencies have detected traces of water ice in the region’s shadowed craters in recent years.

Plans were made to evacuate the 26 residents of Shakhtinsky, a village in Russia’s far east, during the launch because of a ‘one in a million chance’ that one of the rocket stages that launches Luna-25 could fall to Earth there.

There is much riding on the Luna-25 mission, as the Kremlin says the West’s sanctions over the Ukraine war, many of which have targeted Moscow’s aerospace sector, have failed to cripple the Russian economy.

The moonshot, which Russia has been planning for decades, will also test the nation’s growing independence in space after its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine severed nearly all of Moscow’s space ties with the West, besides its integral role on the International Space Station.

The European Space Agency had planned to test its Pilot-D navigation camera by attaching it to Luna-25, but severed its ties to the project after Russia invaded Ukraine.

‘Russia’s aspirations towards the Moon are mixed up in a lot of different things,’ said Asif Siddiqi, professor of history at Fordham University, speaking to the Reuters news agency. ‘I think first and foremost, it’s an expression of national power on the global stage.’

US astronaut Neil Armstrong gained renown in 1969 for being the first person to walk on the Moon, but the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 mission was the first spacecraft to reach the Moon’s surface in 1959, and the Luna-9 mission in 1966 was the first to make a soft landing there.

More recently Moscow has focused on exploring Mars, and since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has not sent scientific probes beyond Earth orbit.

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It’s in a race against India.