Mikhail Marov, a top Russian scientist and astronomer, has been hospitalized after learning that Russia's first post-Soviet moon mission failed when the Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the moon over the weekend.
Marov, 90, one of the leading figures in the Soviet space program, said he was hospitalized after hearing about the failed mission, telling Russian business newspaper RBC on Sunday that lunar expeditions are his life's work.
The unmanned spacecraft Luna-25, which was expected to land on the South Pole of the moon on Monday, spun out of control and crashed into the moon's surface. Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said it lost contact with the spacecraft on Saturday. The expedition was Russia's first since 1976—before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"It is sad that it was not possible to land the apparatus," Marov said. "For me, perhaps, it was the last hope to see the revival of our lunar program."
Marov told RBC he is under the supervision of doctors at the Central Clinical Hospital located nearby to the Kremlin in Moscow. He also called on authorities to not be quiet about the reasons for the craft's collapse, saying it should be discussed.
The scientist played a leading role in the development and implementation of the Soviet program for the exploration of space and the solar system, and was involved in the first explorations of Mars and Venus.
Luna-25 was launched on August 11 at at 2 a.m. Moscow time from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, a Russian spaceport in the Amur region, some 3,450 miles (5,550) kilometers east of Moscow.
According to NASA, the mission had two primary scientific objectives: to study composition of the polar regolith, and to study the plasma and dust components of the lunar polar exosphere. It was expected to operate on the lunar surface, studying surface regolith and exospheric dust and particles, for one year.
Konstantin Sonin, a Russian-born political economist from the University of Chicago, in a post on X, formerly Twitter, described the mission as Russian President Vladimir Putin's "vanity project amid constant repression of intellectuals, a war on science and education that has government waged, a war on international cooperation that they waged even before they started an actual war."
"In Soviet times, vanity was there, and military goals were there. Yet it was also a wealth of genuine enthusiasm of scientists and engineers...They used the state's vanity and desire to have missiles to fulfill their space dreams," he added on Sunday. "Putin's people, besides vanity, put the money into the space project for one single reason, to have these money stolen. It would be a miracle if Luna-25 mission was successful - Putin's people did everything to have it failed."
Newsweek has contacted Russia's Foreign Ministry via email for comment.
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Isabel van Brugen is a Newsweek Reporter based in Kuala Lumpur. Her focus is reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war. Isabel ... Read more
