Russia launches first moon mission in nearly 50 years

The lander is expected to touch down on the moon on Aug. 21, Russia's space chief Yuri Borisov said, though the space agency previously pegged Aug. 23 as the landing date.

Russia launched its first moon-landing spacecraft in 47 years on Friday in a bid to be the first nation to make a soft landing on the lunar south pole, a region believed to hold coveted pockets of water ice.

The Russian lunar mission, the first since 1976, is racing against India, which launched its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander last month, and more broadly with the United States and China, both of which have advanced lunar exploration programs targeting the lunar south pole.

A Soyuz 2.1 rocket carrying the Luna-25 craft blasted off from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles (5,550 km) east of Moscow, at 2:11 a.m. on Friday Moscow time (1111 GMT on Thursday).

The lander was boosted out of Earth’s orbit toward the moon over an hour later, at which point mission control took command of the craft,Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said.

The lander is expected to touch down on the moon on Aug. 21, Russia’s space chief Yuri Borisov told state television, though the space agency previously pegged Aug. 23 as the landing date.

“Now we will wait for the 21st. I hope that a highly precise soft landing on the moon will take place,” Borisov told workers at the Vostochny cosmodrome after the launch. “We hope to be first.”

Luna-25, roughly the size of a small car, will aim to operate for a year on the moon’s south pole, where scientists at NASA and other space agencies in recent years have detected traces of water ice in the region’s shadowed craters.

There is much riding on the Luna-25 mission, as the Kremlin says the West’s sanctions over the Ukraine war, many of which have targeted Moscow’s aerospace sector, have failed to cripple the Russian economy.