It Still Ain't Easy Landing On The Moon

Missions from Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Russia, the European Space Agency, Luxembourg, South Korea and Italy have also had some measure of lunar success with fly-bys, orbiters and impacts (whether intentional or not).

On August 19 2023, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced that“communication with the luna-25 spacecraft was interrupted”, after an impulse command was sent to the spacecraft to lower its orbit around the moon. Attempts to contact the spacecraft on August 20 were unsuccessful, leading Roscosmos to determine Luna 25 had crashed.

Despite more than 60 years of spaceflight experience extending from the USSR to modern Russia, this mission failed. We don't know exactly what happened – but the current situation in Russia, where resources are stretched thin and tensions are high due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, may well have been a factor.

The Luna-25 failure recalled two high-profile lunar crashes in 2019.

In April that year, the Israeli beresheet lander crash-landed after a gyroscope failed during the braking procedure, and the ground control crew was unable to reset the component due to a loss of communications. It was later reported a capsule containing microscopic creatures called tardigrades, in a dormant“cryptobiotic” state, may have survived the crash.

And in September, India sent its own Vikram lander down to the surface of the moon – but it did not survive the landing. Nlater released an image taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the site of the Vikram lander's impact. Debris was scattered over almost two dozen locations spanning several kilometers.

Space missions are a risky business. Just over 50% of lunar missions succeed . Even small satellite missions to Earth's orbit don't have a perfect track record, with a success rate somewhere between 40% and 70%.

We could compare uncrewed with crewed missions: around 98% of the latter are successful , because people are more invested in people. Ground staff working to support a crewed mission will be more focused, management will invest more resources, and delays will be accepted to prioritize the safety of the crew.

We could talk about the details of why so many uncrewed missions fail. We could talk about technological difficulties, lack of experience, and even the political landscapes of individual countries.

But perhaps it's better to step back from the details of individual missions and look at averages, to see the overall picture more clearly.

Rocket launches and space launches are not very common in the scheme of things. There are around 1.5 billion cars in the world, and perhaps 40,000 airplanes . By contrast, there have been fewer than 20,000 space launches in all of history.

Plenty of things still go wrong with cars, and problems occur even in the better-regulated world of planes, from loose rivets to computers overriding pilot inputs. And we have more than a century of experience with these vehicles, in every country on the planet.

So perhaps it's unrealistic to expect spaceflight – whether it's the launch stage of rockets, or the even rarer stage of trying to land on an alien world – to have ironed out all its problems.

We are still very much in the early, pioneering days of space exploration.

If humanity is ever to create a fully-fledged space-faring civilization, we must overcome monumental challenges .

To make long-duration, long-distance space travel possible, there are a huge number of problems to be solved. Some of them seem within the realm of the possible, such as better radiation shielding, self-sustaining ecosystems, autonomrobots, extracting air and water from raw resources, and zero-gravity manufacturing.

Others are still speculative hopes, such as faster-than-light travel, instantanecommunication, and artificial gravity.

Progress will be little by little, small step by slightly larger step. Engineers and space enthusiasts will keep putting their brainpower, time and energy into space missions, and they will gradually become more reliable.

And maybe one day we'll see a time when going for a ride in your spacecraft is as safe as getting in your car.

gail iles is Senior Lecturer in Physics, rmit university

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