The unmanned craft was due to make a soft landing on the Moon’s south pole, but failed after encountering problems as it moved into its pre-landing orbit.
It was Russia’s first Moon mission in almost 50 years.
Russia has been racing to the Moon’s south pole against India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to land on there next week.
No country has ever landed on the south pole before, although both the US and China have landed softly on the Moon’s surface.
No report on whether or not Russia was attempting to use repurposed anti-ship missiles like the ones they use to attack schools and hospitals here on Earth.
I didn’t know they have schools on the moon. Or was it a power station?
Maternity ward.
No report on whether or not Russia was attempting to use repurposed anti-ship missiles like the ones they use to attack schools and hospitals here on Earth.
Yeah, Russia should be like heckin’ wholesome NASA and their peaceful apolitical former SS officers who never bombed any hospitals or schools instead.
Ah yea. Who can forget the US operation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim
The US created the first liquid propulsion rocket. While Stalin, oh, imprisoned their scientists in the gulag.
Plenty of SS officers and other Nazis went to Russia to make the R-1 clone of the V2. Which, btw, had a failure rate higher than the US clone.
Ahh yes, bringing German scientists and technical staff to the USSR to learn from them and then repatriating them back to the GDR 5 years later is exactly the same as putting an SS Sturmbanfuhrer who was personally in command of a facility where slave labor was worked to death into leading roles in your space program into the 1970s.
Let’s also just conveniently ignore the fact that the R-2 rocket was developed by Korolev’s team in direct competition with the G-1 rocket developed by a German team working in the USSR. The USSR chose the R-2 over the G-1 specifically because it didn’t want the Soviet space program being led by Germans and by 1950 had repatriated most of the German specialists.
After 1950 the Soviet program was largely indigenous, led by Korolev and other Soviet citizens. All of the major achievements of the Soviet program were led by Soviet citizens, scientists and workers.
The entire V-2 team under von Braun from Peenemunde surrendered to the Americans on May 2, 1945 and brought with them more than 400 core scientific-technical employees, full documentation and reports and more than 100 intact copies of the A4/V-2 rockets ready to be shipped to the front, together with the combat launchers and the military personnel trained to operate the missiles.
The Peenemunde site was by then already deliberately destroyed to prevent anything useful from falling into the Soviet hands.
Operation “Ost” did happen, however, but the highest ranked German scientist they managed to recruit was Helmut Grottrup, who was von Braun’s deputy for missile radio-control and for electrical systems. He had claimed to be an anti-fascist, we may never know the truth, but he was indeed imprisoned by the Nazis for a time.
The vast majority of the German specialists who worked for the Soviets were not former associates of von Braun in Peenemunde, but were instead introduced to rocket technology when the Soviets established the Institutes RABE and Nordhausen in Germany after winning the war.
Werner von Braun later remarked:
“… the USSR nevertheless succeeded in acquiring the chief electronics specialist Helmut Gröttrup… But he was the only important catch from among the Peenemünde specialists.”
Other German scientists who worked for the Soviets such as Kurt Magnus and Hans Hoch (leading academics in gyroscopy) as well as Manfred von Ardenne (later awarded Hero of Socialist Labor) came from the academia and adjacent industries, and were not members of the Nazi Party.
They also managed to recruit workers and technicians who were POWs liberated from the Dora concentration camp (which supplied personnel for the notorious Mittelwerk factory, where von Braun had committed crimes against humanity including the torture, beatings and execution of the prison labor). Many of the POWs were involved in the sabotage of the A4 (V-2) rocket production at Mittelwerk, and resulting in substantial proportion of misfires and inaccurate flight trajectory when the Nazis used the rockets against England.
In other words, the Soviets had to reverse engineer pretty much everything from scratch (the R-1, which is the copy of A4/V-2), while the Americans got everything they needed. The Americans only fired the V-2 a few times, and then went on with their own “hybrid” designs such as the Navaho, Aerobee and Viking.
And in spite of all this, with such overwhelming advantage, the Americans still LOST the race against the USSR. The R-7 became the world’s first ICBM to be launched in 1957.
To put it in the terminology of you computer nerds, the Americans got the entire core dev team, with the complete source code and full documentations, and the whole tech support team, while the Soviets had to work with and piece together information from third party developers, and still raced ahead of the Americans.
Remember that time Americans and West Europeans thought it a good idea to put a literal German Nazi general as head of NATO? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger lol fun times
“We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy but because it
is hardgives us an excuse to put Nazis in leadership positions.”
Aww man…
I like it when space stuff works and when it explodes it makes me sad :(
(Unless there’s a billionaire on board)
Comments exactly what I expected. Disappointed how many people here are knee jerk celebrating the failure. Feels like being in a room full of Republicans when someone says anything about Mexico or Islam.
I hope they fix their shit for Luna 26 for the sake of science and human discovery.
deleted by creator
You know normally I would applaud them. Happy when China has a success. Screw Russia though. This was a propaganda mission to get a win. The fact that did it in a rush to beat another country is typical of their philosophy. There was little science in this but mostly just dick waving.
This was my impression. This was a rushed propaganda mission for prestige using existing material.
Still, I’m sure there would have been some useful science done, but the main point of the mission was that Putin’s regime would have been able to crow about how great Russia is doing.
Of course, if it had succeeded, it might have spurred some competitive spirit in other space powers.
I still haven’t ruled out that Putin was trying to invade the moon.
Well your intention is admirable but childish.
Nobody gives a fuck about Russia’s scientific endeavours when they’re re starting the biggest military conflict in Europe since WWII and threatening everyone with a nuclear conflict.
Most probably any scientific progress that could be made will not be used for mankind’s progress but for the current militaristic propaganda.
All of Apollo took place during the Vietnam war. Somehow I think you’d feel differently about that.
You’re correct about the Appolo missions, but don’t tell me the Space Race was about science. It’s was fully politically motivated also. Without the Cold War nobody would have put the money and effort in so the Moon landing could happen in '69.
There are a lot of other missions that happened for pure scientific reasons but I don’t think this is one of them.
Disagree. I hate the russian goverment and its fascist invasion lf Ukraine, but a moon lander is great scientific progress no matter where it comes from. It is sad that this happened and its why the lack of international cooperation in space exploration is bad for humanity as a whole.
I understand your point of view and it’s correct but not realistic. This mission is bashed because it’s purpose was never science but propaganda. To validate a Phoenix like revival of the Russian empire. That they are strong and relevant on the world scene. The reactions to the failure were in tune with the intended purpose of the mission. Science (like usual) is the background of the political agenda.
People here acting like a moon mission is going to uncover the cure for cancer. lmao
Ignorance to the actual Nazis in Ukraine and their military is also severely childish.
deleted by creator
Cope. Most ppl would dislike russia since it is and authoritarian shithole. The only reason russia is tolerated is opposition to the USA. Tolerance is different from endorsement or appreciation. Fuck Russia
deleted by creator
I thought Russia said they would not share any of the science.
Even if that is correct (I just don’t know, I don’t follow this stuff), external observation can still be useful.
Special lunar operation.
“This is all the West’s fault!”
This but unironically. In general though, there is nothing more galling than liberals complaining about Russia. You made it this way. This is on you. First you destroy the soviet union, then you reconfigure the politics and economy of Russia, and then you have the audacity to complain about the very thing you caused.
Liberals: the downfall of USSR/Russia
LO fucking L
“You made me do this” is literal abuser logic.
Don’t compare committing a violent coup against them with not having dinner ready you cynical piece of shit
Alright, I’ll bite. Whom do you mean by “them” and what coup are you referring to?
That’s not what they fucking said and also the comparison is senseless.
Ah yes, well known liberal checks notes George Bush.
Russia cannibalised itself after the Soviet Union fell, didn’t need any Western help there.
Please lookup the Shock Doctrine and educate yourself
I’m not reading a pop politics book for you. Go read The Gulag Archipelago.
deleted by creator
If that’s your takeaway, you haven’t.
deleted by creator
lol fuck you I’m not eating vegitables. you go eat a pop tart
“Excuse me but my book was spawned at the beginning of time with no creator and thus no bias or agenda, and is a crystal of pure truth, and yours is poopy tankie peepee”
I don’t care about antisemitic noblemen. His book is fake, and he’s lucky he wasn’t killed.
“I’m not reading pop politics, go read literal fiction”
The one written literally decades before the events in question?
The USA was attempting to destroy the USSR from day one. Despite being an extremely intelligent and educated person, you were never told that the USA actually invaded Russia within months of the October Revolution. Liberals are such a fucking joke.
“The USSR destroyed itself.” Give me a break. The USA’s entire existence derives from stealing land from indigenous people and enslaving and exterminating them. Because the USSR dared to declare that it was an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist project, the USA dedicated everything to its annihilation. But thankfully the story isn’t over. China never broke with Stalin.
My guy, China is the least socialist place on earth. It is so capitalist and so unequal. You pay to use the roads, you pay to use the hospitals, you pay for any schooling past middle school, if you don’t have a city residence permit your pension is 5% of those that do.
Have you ever been?
Capitalism is when you pay for things, and the more you pay for things, the more capitalister it is. When atoms exchange valence electrons, for example, that’s capitalism right there. Entrepreneurship has been woven into the fabric of reality since God, the great investor in the sky, created it.
What’s funny is that the US ruling class doesn’t pay for anything—they’re so rich and powerful specifically because they’re stealing from everyone else (including you)—yet nobody would argue that the US isn’t a capitalist hellhole in terminal decline.
I have to wonder—if China isn’t a socialist country, why is every student there compelled to study Marxism? Isn’t it extremely dangerous for a country masquerading as socialist to expose every single student under its sovereignty to Marxist texts?
If socialism isn’t from each according to his means to each according to his needs then what the fuck is it?
The quote is “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” Mr. Marxism expert.
Was capitalism built in a day? Do you think that Xi can just press the communism button and make everything instantly perfect everywhere? That’s not how it works. China is currently doing the USSR’s (and Stalin’s) NEP, but they’re doing it so much harder than Stalin ever did. They are literally hanging the capitalists with the rope the capitalists are selling them. Once the forces of production are built up to a point where everyone’s necessities are met—and once the USA is no longer in existence—it will become possible for the world to move forward into the next stage of history.
Also I like how you didn’t answer the question about Marxism being taught to Chinese students. Because there is no answer. Because you are wrong 😉
deleted by creator
Capitalism is when exchange.
In exchange for such a shit statement I could give a slap on the face and that would count as capitalism in your book.
If your idea of socialism is homeless people dying in the streets and people stepping over children because taking them to hospital lumbers you with their medical bills then, sure, China is as socialist as they come.
Why are you explaining me my home town and calling it China?
Also, how about we get a source on these claims?
and people stepping over children because taking them to hospital lumbers you with their medical bills then
This is an outdated trope from a defect in their liability laws that are mostly fixed.
Political Liberal not “social liberal”
Bush was a capital L Liberal Capitalist
You mean economic liberal? Bush was far from politically liberal.
In the sense of “liberal” as used in political philosophy or how the word is applied to party names in most countries around the world, yes Bush was a liberal. Americans tend to use the word differently though, since both major US parties are pro-business liberal parties, of a sort. This maybe applies a bit less to the Republicans today than in did in GHW Bush’s day, although by how much is still up for debate.
Liberal as in the tradition of John Locke, not the American vernacular sense
The bourgeoisie cannibalised Russia. Liberals from the west insisted that Russia and the rest of the Soviet republics would be ruled by the bourgeoisie. This was the whole point of the Cold War. At huge expense to its own citizenry the west conducted a series of proxy wars and led an arms race to make it as difficult as possible for workers to control their own destiny.
As expected, false scarcity and extreme inequality followed, and to justify or explain this inequality, the bourgeoisie used from the usual ethnic and sexual minority scapegoats. With your weird understanding of history, you’re obviously American, so none of this should be hard to understand. You have people dying on the streets, the government won’t even raise the minimum wage, but the news about the evils of Mexicans, blacks, trans people, etc. never stops.
Removed by mod
mfw liberals say they’re better than conservatives because bigotry
updoots to the left, fellow gentlesirs!
Homophobia
The soviet union destroyed itself because it was an unstable pile of dogshit.
Wonder why it was made unstable in the first place? Ever wondered who contributed to the illegal dissolution of the USSR?
That states had to react to threats from the US never crosses their mind. The whole dissolution of the USSR and subsequent pillaging played out on the nightly news for years and I’ve never met a liberal that remembers it. They do vaguely remember that the USSR had an aggressive security state but can’t ever understand why.
Most thoughtful liberal political analysis.
Man, we needed you decades ago. Imagine how much money we could have saved on thr cold war. All that threatening to destroy the planet for nothing. The genocides we did? Judt big oopsies
What’s the problem. It was a lunar lander. It landed on the moon. Mission accomplished.
Nobody walked away from that landing, so it definitely wasn’t a good one. The fact that there was nobody to walk away from the landing is a mere technicality.
I now have flashbacks to computer games in the early 80’s.
Well, hopefully India has more success.
Whatever scientific data humanity would gain from such a success is in no way worth the decade of triumphant screeching from Hindu nationalists that would result.
There’s gonna be nationalistic screeching no matter what, like I’m sure it felt in the 30 years after the US moon landing
deleted by creator
Tbh the only way to win an interaction with a Hindu nationalists is to not interact.
But would it be worth it if Russia did the same?
(Though, this isn’t mentioning they targeted the moon because all their missions to other planets ended in total failure. This one did at least make it to it’s target, so that’s better than Russia has done in a long time. Their space program, along with their government and military, is a joke.)
I suppose that depends on your opinions on the relative annoyingness of Russian nationalists vs Hindu Nationalists.
Given that most Russian nationalists post in Russian and aren’t heavily present in English spaces, I find the Hindu nationalists to be more annoying.
So purely because you think they’re annoying… and you’re on hexbear where 90% of the comments are a stupid image instead of anything meaningful. Alright. I guess you’re probably an expert on annoying at this point so you’re opinion must be valid, right?
hexbear where 90% of the comments are a stupid image instead of anything meaningful.
I find this characterization strange, we’ve got emotes and we use them, but the clear majority of comments on most threads are still text-only. Seriously, go to Hexbear and pick a thread.
Yes, I am the solitary Truth Decider. That’s exactly what I claimed.
There are fascists among Russian nationalists, but they are not the people in power (e.g. darling martyr for western media, Navalny, is one). In India, the fascists are much more powerful. On that basis, I think the Russian ones would be bothersome but not as much so. Much better for it to be China, but they can’t do everything.
deleted by creator
Obviously it was not a moon rocket, but a Drone aimed for Kiev.
The moon needed to be de-nazified.
Is Moon NATO member?
The moon was standing there, MENACINGLY!
The moon was encroaching on our sovereign territory.
It was actually a moon rocket
my mistake, surely
I mean its obvious, now that you’ve pointed it out. really. good work there. super neat. well done.
Thank you, it’s no problem.
The Moon looked too much like a kindergarten. The lander got confused.
The fall of the Soviet Union and its consequences for the human race
Moreso just Russia. And that’s little wonder with their current mob leadership.
Yeah totally, juuuuust Russia. It’s not like the whole eastern bloc is in ruins and progress has been more or less stalled for 30 years. But nah m8, just Russia
As someone fond of science, its kinda heart breaking as many people spends decades of work to make this stuff and their dreams get crushed when these fail. Hope they fix and launch another one.
Failures are a part of science! I hope russian scientist dont lose their funding and can continue to contribute to space exploration.
For obvious reasons, I am surprised they have any funding at all right now.
It’s amazing how the funding for space exploration just magically appears when nationalist pissing contests are a go-go. But healthcare? How could we possibly afford it?
Both should be extensively funded, I think.
Whether they should is a thing unworthy of consideration - if they don’t it means we have no use for states at all. The interesting thing is whether they could if they wanted to. And the answer to that is yes - they could. The fact of the matter is that they do not want to.
The US should put a lander together out of trash for shits and giggles and have it land perfectly.
A 1979 TV show about a guy who put together a junk spaceship to salvage junk from the moon: Salvage 1.
My teenage self found it entertaining at the time. Hmmm, now where did I leave my parrot? I wonder if he could help me find a copy…
Or just land people in a few years. They’re working on a several hundred ton lander right now!
On the remains of the
sovietrussian oneNot coincidentally none of the space agencies out there that are capable of this would find it worth their time to launch a mission just to teabag another nation.
just to teabag another nation.
Gestures broadly at the space race of the 1950s
None of the space agencies in the 1950s would be capable of landing gently on a crashed spacecraft.
In the 1950s they had the interest but not the capability. Today they have the capably but not the interest.
Well, I mean NASA pulled a spare mars rover out of their R&D testing labs, modified it’s toolset a bit, and sent it to Mars for a second soft landing (didn’t they use a sky-crane for both rover deployments?). I’d say that takes a bit more skill than landing on the Moon. But I don’t play Kerbal Space Program enough to know how much
They are doing it with the artemis mission
Aw man that sucks
On the one hand, science yadda yadda knowledge for all mankind etc.
On the other hand, failure and humiliation to Russia.
I’m actually a big fan of space exploration and of the exploration and exploitation of the Moon in particular, but under the current circumstances I’m not terribly saddened on the balance.
It sounds like you don’t care that much about science if you’re actually considering national humiliation to be as important as scientific progress.
Actually a little bit of humiliation goes a long way towards diligence when conducting expensive space experiments. Russia used to be the leaders in these fields. The world used to rely on Soviet vehicles for launch. They deserve to be held at a higher standard.
I care very much about science. However, it’s not the only thing I care about, and thwarting Russia’s endeavours are also right up there. Real lives are at stake as opposed to hypothetical and abstract scientific returns. If Russia’s humiliation causes Putin’s regime to collapse quicker then I care about that very much indeed.
How much science was really going to come out of this lander, in the grand scheme of things? Why can’t that science wait?
Well said, the guy you are talking to is a putin lover btw
Of course the BBC has to throw in that bit of kkkracker cope at the end. Nevermind how challenging a south pole landing would be relative to elsewhere on the moon.
:bathroom:
I always suspected that it was just a missile painted like a rocket.
It launched on a soyuz, which has an extremely long history. It first launched in 67. All rockets back then had icbm roots or aspirations. But for a long time all icbms use solid propellent for better long term storage rather than liquid propellant like soyuz.
I hear you saying that they’re very similar platforms. I’m saying that the neccesary differences that would make it a scientific rocket were simply missing, an empty shell, a smokeshow.
What differences? The difference between icbms and rockets to launch to space is usually the time it takes to get the rocket ready to launch, and how long it can be stored for.
Scientific instruments, sufficient navigation technology, communications
That’s on the satellite itself, not the launch vehicle. As far as I know, there’s no commonality between the lander and the multiple reentry vehicle upper stages of rockets. Here’s more about the lander: https://youtu.be/XM8bJsqCLYQ
