“Pootie’s” Moon Adventure CRASHES

Today’s science lesson ladies and gents is that landing a spacecraft on another celestial body is a very difficult thing to do.  Even on the one closest to us.  Our Moon.  When a country pulls it off it’s a big freaking deal, and allows for some serious bragging rights.  Of course, if you make a big deal about giving it a try and fail?  Well, this Putin “Judo Master fail seems to capture it pretty well:

Sometimes a person tries to show off by taking on a bigger task than they can handle.

Russia announced its Luna-25 spacecraft, a robotic lander has crashed into the moon.  Russia had hoped for a Monday landing at the moon’s south pole to conduct a robust scientific mission.  Oops.  Things didn’t work out that way.  As this article from Space.com notes:

“A preliminary analysis suggests that the wayward orbital maneuver sent Luna-25 into an unexpected trajectory, one in which the moon lander “ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface,” Roscosmos wrote.”

Vladmir Putin aka “Pootie” is having a bad, very bad weekend.  His war in Ukraine turned out to be a disaster that’s bleeding not just his once vaunted armed forces dry, but his entire country which wasn’t in so great shape even before his Ukraine fail.  And as news that although slow, Ukraine IS making progress in its counter-offensive and starting to breach Russian defenses and drive towards the sea cutting off a whole bunch of Russians he really needed a win.  This long planned mission to make a landing on the lunar south pole was going to be it.

Worse, Putin copied the U.S. model of farming out spacecraft development straight to our private sector and tried the same in Russia.  Let’s face it.  He didn’t really have much choice as Russia’s state owned production facilities aren’t any better than they were during the Cold War.  Not that they didn’t produce some advanced aircraft and spacecraft because they did.  But every success comes after a string of failures.  Back in the glory days of NASA we decided at least when it came to spacecraft and rockets that took them out there we’d do it all openly.  In public view.  The USSR hid it’s failures which were just as epically spectacular and sometimes tragic.

Still, Russia hasn’t been without some successes in space and Putin needed something to show off, something that could prove to the world Russia was still not only at the top of its game but a leader.  Knowing India had its own lunar landing mission planned Putin decided to revert to a Cold War tactic the USSR used to embarrass the U.S. more than once.  Let me backtrack a minute for those of you who aren’t retirement age, and therefore didn’t live though the “space race” between the U.S. and Russia to land astronauts/cosmonauts on the Moon.

We have to go back to the Eisenhower administration and his SecDef Charlie Wilson.  No, not the one you know from the movie Charlie Wilson’s War.  I’m talking about Charles Erwin Wilson, an engineer who would wind up running General Motors.  His nomination and conformation got rather controversial but he was overwhelmingly confirmed.  It was a difficult time for DOD, navigating policy at a time after the Defense Reauthorization Act had transformed the Army and Navy into four separate branches  The Army Air Corps became the Air Force, and while the Marines had always been and still remain part of the Dept. of the Navy they got a boost in status with the Commandant becoming one of the four Joint Chiefs.

Amidst all of that was the issue of nuclear weapons and delivery systems – including and especially rockets.  We had plenty of homegrown engineers, but also the benefit of a cadre of Germans (most notably Werner Von Braun) that had built rockets for Hitler.  However, Russia had some of those guys too.  The fact was we could have put a satellite into earth orbit well before we did but Wilson advised against doing so.  Eventually science advisors convinced Eisenhower to turn the engineers loose and here’s where the “space race” actually began.  The U.S. announced it would put a satellite into earth orbit.  The USSR, working on the same thing said nothing and we didn’t realize (until too late) how far along they were.  Sure enough, a stunned U.S. and world saw the USSR put Sputnik up there.

The U.S. announced it would put a satellite into heliocentric (orbiting the sun) orbit and what do you know.  Once again out of the blue the USSR announced THEY had done so!  The fact we went on and did just what we said we’d do and pretty much when we said meant nothing in DC.  Politicians and other technological incompetents brayed at outer space and the press ran with it.  The U.S. was behind!  Once it became clear there would be a race to see who would be the first to put a man into space all bets were off and panic ensued, at times rising to a level of hysteria.  Damn if the Russians didn’t get a guy up there before we did and when Alan Shepard finally made our first trip into space it wasn’t even an orbital flight like the freaking Russians had done.  No, Shepard and then Gus Grissom made suborbital flights – fifteen minutes up and down instead of at leas completing an actual orbit like Yuri Gagarin.

When John Glenn became the first AMERICAN to actually orbit the earth it was “mere catch-up” and not even really that because the USSR had sent others up.  There was a lot of panic and national embarrassment felt by the U.S. as the USSR was using its space program to taunt us, and proclaim the “superiority of Communism.”  We would of course win that “space race”, the ultimate goal as in being the first nation to land people on the moon and bring them back safely.  We did it multiple times in fact, and five decades after the last manned lunar mission the U.S remains the only country to have pulled off such an amazing engineering and technological feat.

Pootie, who grew up to become a mid-level KGB analyst who has never let go of the bitterness he felt when the USSR lost the Cold War and dissolved has sought ever since to restore the “glory” of the old USSR via a leaner and meaner Russia.  It wasn’t going like he’d hoped, and even owning Trump as his puppet didn’t at least quite break up NATO.  Damage it?  Yes, but it was a stronger alliance that he (and Trump) thought and as we know Joe Biden came in and bandaged up the wounds.

So Pootie went for broke and invaded Ukraine.  In large part to cause renewed chaos in NATO and western Europe.  Having been dropped from the G-7 which he’d temporarily make the G-8 he figured some old fashioned economic blackmail would make Russia feared again.  Both because of oil & gas pipelines and it’s grain output taking over Ukraine would give him powerful economic weapons.

As you know his Ukraine gambit failed.  There’s plenty of suffering and dying yet to come but having not won long ago Putin and Russia have already lost.  The only question in the end will be how badly but it’s already bad.  Enough Putin has for some time been quite literally in fear for his life.  He has needed, and I mean REALLY needed something that would allow him to puff up his little, flabby chest and brag about.

The now failed lunar landing mission, already years in the making would be it.  Better still, he could try the old “space race” thing only this time using India as his foil.  Not quite as cool for the folks in Russia but what the hell.  India as a foe in a technological race would do (he hoped) well enough to give him and Russia something to brag about.  And maybe cause those we know are eyeing ways to take him out to back off, at least for a while.

Knowing India’s schedule for their own unmanned landing a shift in Russia’s plans was made and not just to beat them.  Nope.  I can’t say for sure but I think Russia chose to up the stakes to allow India to launch first, sending their spacecraft on a rather leisurely journey to the moon, and then launching the Russian mission which would literally pass India’s out there in space.  How cool would that be?  Create a space ‘drag race” and wind up doing a south lunar pole landing?

It will take a long time to analyze what went wrong but telemetry and tracking will, even if Russia won’t cough up answers on their own other nations like ours will mostly figure out.  I’m betting that faster than needed trip to the moon will have contributed to calculations being off enough that instead of a soft landing and a lot of valuable science being conducted we see a crashed Russian lander.  Each new image of the wreckage will be a reminder of Pootie’s failure.

His big gamble failed.  It crashed.  At least it didn’t burn too. (No people meant no oxygen on the thing and what fuel there was would really burn in with no atmosphere of any type around the moon.

Still, even if Luna didn’t “crash & burn” it still crashed and headlines of “Russian lunar lander crashed” around the world is bad enough.  As bad as that is, it might get even worse for Pootie.  India’s mission is proceeding on schedule for a south lunar pole landing near where Russia had intended to land.  IF they pull it off, it might just be the end of Vlad “Pootie” Putin.  Keep an eye on India’s landing attempt because it could ignite a lot more than a leap in scientific knowledge.