The last time being nearly 50 years ago. And this time they didn’t even manage to get into orbit, landing is supposed to be the hard part.
I mean sure, there are failures all the time. But it just seems weird bringing up Russia’s (or anyone’s) successful space program when India lands on the moon.
It’s not that weird, Russia’s was the most recent attempt before this one. India landed today, Russia crashed last weekend, Japan crashed back in April, India crashed 2019. Those are all the most relevant ones to talk about in relation to this one due to timing and landing site.
The landing part is the hard part, but it isn’t like Russia is any less inept than any other nation with a space program. Until SpaceX and now NASA got their new launch systems up and running, it was Russia that was getting our people to and from the ISS. The US had a pretty long span of time having to rely on basically the same launch systems that were directly competing against them during the race to the Moon. Shit is just really hard no matter how long any nation/company has been doing it. We still get plenty of pretty epic explosions from SpaceX and will see many more (especially with the BFR project). And before them we lost Challenger without it making it to space, and Colombia while coming back to earth. They did at least get to the Moon and did leave a mark of sorts. I wish there were cameras with high resolution recording all the landings and crashes from all nations that could upload after the fact for us to see. I would love to see how big the dust plumes get from all of them (especially the crashes), and see how long it takes for shit to settle again.
NASA still haven’t really got their SLS or any other launch system up and running, just SpaceX with Crew Dragon. SLS is in the pipeline but not yet certified for people - the first crewed launch is currently scheduled for Nov 2024, however that date may well slide. That leaves just SpaceX as an alternative to Russia, at least for crewed missions.
More recently the reliability of Russian rockets has been called into question. SpaceX launch far more than Russia now and with SpaceX it’s pretty much become routine. Excluding Starship, SpaceX haven’t had a launch failure since 2016. Meanwhile, Russia have their own distractions going on here on Earth.
Space is hard, but achieving orbits is on the easier end of it and should be fairly routine. Russia have experience landing on the moon in the past, however by their own admission that experience wasn’t available in the recent mission. Obviously we don’t know exactly what went wrong with Russia’s attempt, but it is a little concerning they failed at such a small hurdle.
I’ve been sitting next to Ukrainians in the lecture hall before most of y’all even shat your pampers.
