Well, darn. So much for Battlebots: On the moon!
Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud
Russia’s rushed attempt to land a probe on the Moon has failed. News that the mission was in trouble came on Saturday when national space agency Роскосмос (Roscosmos) used its Telegram account to reveal that the Luna 25 probe was instructed to enter its pre-landing orbit, but an emergency occurred, and the maneuver was not a …
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Monday 21st August 2023 19:52 GMT Richard 12
Nah, they wanted a longer fall.
They got a very short, very fast fall, which promoted the craft from "lander" to "regolith penetrator".
I do wonder whether the Indian government will publish the photos. I believe Chadrayaan 2 has the best cameras ever put in lunar orbit, so they should eventually get some very interesting images.
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Monday 21st August 2023 12:44 GMT Charlie Clark
While I think sanctions are working, I don't think this failure is evidence of it. Russia has been losing well educated engineers for years: Putin has never really cared about science so there's no money in it and fewer people study it. They're technology has hardly moved on from Soviet stuff which is why, for example, they're importing drones from Iran.
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Monday 21st August 2023 02:51 GMT Gene Cash
"rushed attempt"?
Luna 24 was in 1976. Luna 25 started development in the 1990s. That's not quite what I would call a rush job. Well, except maybe if you're Capita.
In the early 2000s it was supposed to be part of the Japanese Lunar-A mission. In 2007, it was supposed to be the lander for the Indian Luna-Resource mission. It was also supposed to be vaguely part of the ExoMars program.
In 2021, they found out the laser doppler velocity & range system didn't work with the integrated guidance.
Also, because of sanctions, they weren't able to use an Airbus inertial measurement unit weighing about 1.5kg, and they had to switch to a Russian IMU weighing about 10kg, which was slower, needed more power, and was far less accurate. Well, I guess now we know how much slower and less accurate it was!
Also note that Russia's previous 4 deep space probes have failed. Phobos 1 & 2 in 1988, Mars 96 in 1996, and Fobos-Grunt in 2011.
Most of this is from Scott Manley's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM8bJsqCLYQ
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Monday 21st August 2023 07:50 GMT sarusa
Re: "rushed attempt"?
This is absolutely rushed in the sense that it was mandated just because Pooty Poot has had so many humiliations in the Ukraine war lately and thought maybe they could still be relevant in space (the one thing they have going for them because they're riding on 50 year old legacy), so it got pushed through even though the engineers knew it had almost no chance of working. It was entirely political. 30+ years in planning means worse than nothing if your capability has been plummeting every year because it's a rapacious kleptocracy.
Unless you have the engineering down and are confident about the components and design, if you just flail about and launch it for purely political reasons it's RUSHED - even it you've been working on it for a hundred years. And Pooty Poot's kleptocracy is no longer capable of doing anything other than destroying nice things, which is what Russia has been best at since Ivan the Terrible (with a very brief blip of 'Okay, they're pretty good at space').
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Tuesday 22nd August 2023 13:27 GMT fg_swe
No
Because Putin brought a much more efficient Mafia than what they already had then. The modern Mafia knows how to feed and clothe the populace, all while building superyachts and consuming Italian cheese. The previous Mafia had them starving.
He essentially jump-started the seemingly broken soviet system and had some success in wheat production, minerals and coasting on great soviet weapons such as the Mig31.
Then he made a big mistake and believed his own Propaganda, which says that Russia is on par with NATO. From that followed the Ukraine war.
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Wednesday 23rd August 2023 08:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
USA isn't much further forward (travelling in South Carolina, was like visiting the movie "Deliverance" right down to the people in dungarees or just shorts sitting on the veranda of a run down shack ) , they seem to like voting for no health care.
unfortunately tory twats (including starmer and wes streeting ) are trying to import the same shit health care from USA.
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Monday 21st August 2023 16:46 GMT dlc.usa
Attribution and Text Correction
https://www.newsweek.com/top-20-quotes-chuck-yeager-first-man-break-sound-barrier-1553038
Number 5: "If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing."
He would know, as a WWII ace shooting down Nazi aircraft over the Channel at the beginning of his stellar career. Sometimes maintenance had a lot to do overnight to make the aircraft reusable.
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Monday 21st August 2023 07:09 GMT abend0c4
According to The Guardian
Russian scientists have repeatedly complained that the space programme has been weakened by poor managers who are keen for unrealistic vanity space projects, corruption and a decline in the rigour of Russia’s post-Soviet scientific education system.
Sounds like Russia, too, has had enough of experts.
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Monday 21st August 2023 18:02 GMT MachDiamond
Re: I normally have a lot of sympathy in cases like this...
"Space missions are generally of benefit to all, but we just know Putin pushed this forward to "beat" India and be the first to the South Pole and would have made hay from a successful mission."
Single grandstand missions shouldn't count. What's needed is an entire program with useful goals.
I'd like to see the national/international programs lay the groundwork for commercial projects to follow behind. If NASA and other national space programs can just rent a room and a workbench from a private entity on/in the moon, doing pure science would get much cheaper.
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Monday 21st August 2023 07:34 GMT Pascal Monett
"Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"
Well that's already a clear sign that this mission was placed squarely under the sign of Brilliant Communist Success Story instead of being careful, taking things easy and just getting there.
They could have spent 40+ days getting there, slower arrival speed, easier to slow down. But no, Communism slows down for nothing. So they arrived much faster, something went wrong (did the political commissar attached to the project take advantage of the situation to sell off a few minor parts, gasket, switch, modulator ? Nobody will notice, right ?), and the burn destined to slow the craft down ended up sending it directly into the Moon.
It must be exhausting to live in a country where everything you do must not only be a success, but also something the higher-ups always need to be able to brag about.
Doing Science in that kind of environment is crazy.
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Monday 21st August 2023 10:44 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: "Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"
Russia hasn't been communist for about 99 years, since Uncle Joe got in, or possibly 106 years, if you consider that the Bolsheviks weren't exactly borotherly towards other political entities.
This is why our Left-Pondian cousins are so rabidly anti-socialist, because they think that the USSR calling itself socialist was the same as the USSR being socialist.
This, plus socialism and communism are not the same thing; a commune doesn't necessarily have to be run as a socialist endeavour, and socialist societal structures do not necessarily have to be organised into communes. That aside, the USSR rapidly dropped the communism aspect around the time of the end of the first world war, and only really made a pretense of socialism by the time all Russia's satellite states were being made to send their resources home to Moscow.
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Monday 21st August 2023 18:05 GMT MachDiamond
Re: "Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"
"This is why our Left-Pondian cousins are so rabidly anti-socialist, because they think that the USSR calling itself socialist was the same as the USSR being socialist."
Unfortunately, far too many people in the US can't give a good definition of Communism, Socialism and Capitalism. They'll often combine the first two to suit their argument and fail to distinguish between implementations of the latter.
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Monday 21st August 2023 20:53 GMT Eclectic Man
Re: "Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"
MachDiamond: Unfortunately, far too many people in the US can't give a good definition of Communism, Socialism and Capitalism.
"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
John Kenneth Galbraith* (https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/john_kenneth_galbraith_122383)
Come to think of it, I would have trouble giving any sort of coherent definitions of those three. I've never read 'Das Capital', 'The Wealth Of Nations' or any serious book explaining 'Socialism'. (I've never read 'Mein Kamppf' either, so I do not properly understand National Socialism, except they killed a lot of people and were generally nasty and interested in stealing wealth, and I'm just lucky my father's family got out in April 1939. Although I did read Nietzsche's 'On the Genealogy of Morals', which is, as far as I can make out (And to quote Shakespeare), 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing' [Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on this petty pace, day by day, and all our yesterdays serve only to light a path for fools to dusty Death. Out, Out brief Candle etc.])
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith
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Tuesday 22nd August 2023 03:45 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: "Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"
Capitalism is when the military, police, fire, roads, child education and post office are paid for by government
Socialism is when the military, police, fire, roads, child education, post office and medical care are paid for by government
Communism is when the military, police, fire, roads, child education, post office, medical care and nursery care are paid for by government
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Tuesday 22nd August 2023 10:12 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: "Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"
Though if you had read it, you probably still wouldn't; it's not the most...coherent.. of texts.
The recent(ish) official German translation is I think worth reading, especially if you want to understand history, and why people who throw around the 'Nutzi' thing tend to get it wrong. The Germans went to great lengths to publish it with a lot of explanatory notes that put it into context. A lot of the neo-nutzi groups end up cherry picking parts of it and distorting it to their own ends. I think it also helps people to understand why nationalism can be a very dangerous idea, especially when it's at the expense of others. Which seems common in politics today, ie the increasing divisiveness and denigration of political opponents.
But yeh, it's also the diary of a madman, but with a lot less scat than the De Sade version.
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Tuesday 22nd August 2023 10:39 GMT collinsl
Re: "Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"
Putin's regime is based purely on the idea that the state is the biggest gang in town. He operates on the principle of “how much money can I make from this, and how much can my cronies?” (he doesn’t have friends per se). This is why he’s in bed with the organised crime groups in Russia – as long as they don’t embarrass the state or interfere in it’s power he’ll let them run whatever crime rings they like, as long as whenever they are asked to they “render unto Caesar”. In the old days this used to just be a simple donation to a project to fund something (a hospital, an orphanage, a new apartment complex etc) that could then be skimmed from, these days it’s more focused on doing something to help the state instead (hack this country’s electricity grid, remind that person that they shouldn’t interfere with this project (I.E. beat them up), stop using the other border crossing for smuggling as it’s attracting too much heat internationally etc).
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Monday 21st August 2023 18:20 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Hmmm
"Yep, they haven't produced any new engineers of that quality in the last 30 years."
It's hard to get freshly minted engineers to dedicate themselves to a field with few opportunities. The Soyuz is a workhorse of a system, but it hasn't evolved much. When you look at the private companies around the world and the big players, they are all working to build new systems and that keeps interest up. If one of the top guys was 90 and those below him were also well marinated, those looking up from below might worry about having any chance of rising through the ranks. Especially so if they aren't from a certain family or don't have a patron to grease the way for them.
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Tuesday 22nd August 2023 10:10 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Hmmm
Your statement is essentially one of hindsight. 20 years ago there was plenty of opportunity for a Roscosmos to expand in and beyond satellite launch and this could have driven a new generation of engineers as has happened in both India and China but also Japan and South Korea, and eventually even the US. But politics meant that "no one will ever need a rocket more powerful that
640 kBa Proton".It's the same in other fields: medicine, software (Yandex, Vkontakte, Telegram are expections), munitions, drive trains, avionics. Even essentials things like oil pumps and gas turbines can't be developed and maintained by Russians.
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Tuesday 22nd August 2023 10:48 GMT collinsl
Re: Hmmm
Russia’s government is like this from end to end – Putin doesn’t like change. He has refused several times to let his top people retire, and there’s very little change below them either.
Generally, Putin has become bored of being President. Before he started the recent ridiculous war, the theory was that he wanted to become something like “President of the Council of State” so that he could focus on the things he cared about, and could leave the day-to-day management of the kleptocracy to others.
The problem is that he and his cronies need to retain some level of power and influence when they retire so that they can protect their lifestyles – they still want a car & driver/bodyguard, police protection, a nice pension, their mansions etc, and if they hand over power to the next generation then it could all be taken away from them on a whim if they wanted. So they needed to get Government posts with almost no work and a good benefits package so they could continue to influence things and be protected by Putin.
Of course now no one is going anywhere until the war is over.
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Tuesday 22nd August 2023 13:39 GMT Eclectic Man
Re: Hmmm
This is one of the main benefits of democracy - leaders can retire in reasonable safety when they go out of favour. Provided they haven't been too criminal they will have some protection (as the next lot will want to 'retire' in safety in a few decades too). I mean look at some of the UK's 'retired' politicians: Tony Blair for all his good works will be remembered chiefly for going to war in Iraq, (Baron) William 'Matrix Churchill' Waldegrave sold arms to Iraq (see Tony Blair above) contrary to the guidelines provided to parliament and would have allowed the Matrix Churchill directors to be prosecuted until they said they'd spill the beans on him and the UK's Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6) giving them permission. Various Home Secretaries have been found to have acted 'unlawfully' while in office, but faced no penalties. Chris Grayling was a disaster at both Transport and Justice Departments but unaccountably walks free to this day (when is his political memoir coming out, should be a barrel of laughs?).
The problem is that when you set the precedent of imprisoning, assaulting or killing your opponents, eventually you realise that whoever takes over from you is likely to follow your example, so you have to hang on to power for as long as you can when any sensible person would have said 'enough's enough' and buggered off to the country dacha and raised chickens and cherries. Of course! That's it! Putin doesn't want to invade Ukraine, he just wants it as his retirement smallholding! Now I understand.
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Monday 21st August 2023 15:01 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Hmmm
See how hard it is to run a rocket program without fascists !
There is a hilarious-if-true story about Roscosmos raising it's own "Uranus" battalion to fight in Ukraine (as all state owned companies are required o)
Unfortunately many of their staff are from the USSR days and are >60. They all have top secret clearance, having developed the USSR's ICBM program. They immediately got captured and are hopefully now all in a Motel 6 outside Langley writing their memoirs
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Wednesday 23rd August 2023 00:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hmmm
The engines of an ICBM aren't generally the bits you care about keeping secret. By the time the recipient of your special gift delivery service sees them coming over the horizon the engines are pretty much finished.
The navigation, control, re-entry sheilding on the other hand are of interest to the other interested parties.
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Monday 21st August 2023 12:45 GMT Jedit
"ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface"
That may be a machine translation, but it may also just be a polite euphemism. It definitely has the air of the time when my flight boarding was delayed and the pilot informed us that a German pilot had "landed his Dornier while attempting to take off". By which he meant "fucked his take-off and the runway crew are now sweeping up bits of his wingtips" without using a certain five letter word beginning with C in an airport.
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Monday 21st August 2023 13:25 GMT Graham Cobb
Re: Fly me to the moon
Is there some reason that link is indirected through google? It is disappointing enough when an ElReg poster doesn't remove the Youtube tracking from links - but to include Google tracking as well???
The sane link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNLZntSdyKE
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Monday 21st August 2023 16:08 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: field day for the Ukrainians
field day for the Ukrainians
in memes and otherwise, like 'successful
... Drone exhibition and conference?
But I digress. Russia could probably have spun this as a successful test of it's new hypersonic anti-lunar missile. Not exactly a world-first given other impactors have hit targets well away from Earth. But also one of those sad things for Ukraine. It used to have the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, then Pivdenne Design Office in Dnipro, which is now probably rubble. That was originally set up and run by Mikhail Yangel to mass produce ICBMs, but also helped produce the Zenit launcher. Which was probably why Russia took a very dim view of Zelensky announcing at a Munich security conference that they were going to develop their own nukes given Ukraine's previous experience with flying them.
But it also seems to have been one of those industries like Antonov that suffered post-independence. Russia could afford to keep funding NPO Energomash and make engines the US couldn't and folded a lot into it's URSC and Roscosmos.. Which is also why sanctions aren't working as well as hoped, ie under the USSR, key industries were farmed out to client states, post-collapse, those were brought back inside Russia. But Roscosmos operates on a budget of around $2bn, NASA, $25bn. It must cost a lot of overhead to distribute pork.
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Monday 21st August 2023 20:59 GMT Eclectic Man
Not Putin's Day
On top of a slight navigational hiccup for the Moon Lander, one of Russia's supersonic aircraft was 'damaged' recently:
"A flagship Russian long-range bomber has been destroyed in a Ukrainian drone strike, according to reports.
Images posted on social media and analysed by BBC Verify show a Tupolev Tu-22 on fire at Soltsy-2 airbase, south of St Petersburg.
Moscow said that a drone was hit by small-arms fire but managed to "damage" a plane. Ukraine has not commented.
The Tu-22 can travel at twice the speed of sound and has been used extensively by Russia to attack cities in Ukraine."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66573842
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Tuesday 22nd August 2023 16:50 GMT ocelot
I have to feel sorry for the engineers
Despite the high level aims of the mission being mixed with politics as usual, I have to feel some sympathy for the ordinary engineers and scientists who lost their hardware, after so many years.
And I can so easily imagine Boeing in its current state managing exactly the same end result through messing up.