Almost half of Moon missions fail. Why is space still so hard?
In 2019, India attempted to land a spacecraft on the Moon – and ended up painting a kilometres-long streak of debris on its barren surface. Now the Indian Space Research Organisation has returned in triumph, with the Chandrayaan-3 lander successfully touching down near the south pole of Earth's rocky neighbour.
India's success came just days after a spectacular Russian failure, when the Luna 25 mission tried to land nearby and “ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface”.
These twin missions remind us that, close to 60 years after the first successful “soft landing” on the Moon, spaceflight is still difficult and dangerous. Moon missions in particular are still a coin flip, and we have seen several high-profile failures in recent years.
Why were these missions unsuccessful and why did they fail? Is there a secret to the success of countries and agencies who have achieved a space mission triumph?
The Moon is the only celestial location humans have visited (so far). It makes sense to go there first: it's the closest planetary body to us, at a distance of around 400,000 kilometres.
Yet only four countries have achieved successful “soft landings” – landings which the spacecraft survives – on the lunar surface.
The USSR was the first. The Luna 9 mission safely touched down on the Moon almost 60 years ago, in February 1966. The United States followed suit a few months later, in June 1996, with the Surveyor 1 mission.
China was the next country to join the club, with the Chang'e 3 mission in 2013. And now India too has arrived, with Chandrayaan-3.
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
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