Just an hour ago, the new Vulcan Centaur rocket from ULA, the private launch company owned by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, took off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida, carrying Peregrine – which, if all goes according to plan, will become the first private spacecraft to land safely on the moon in a month and a half, on February 23. However, as we know, she is not the first to try to do so. We Israelis remember Beresheet, the local experience, but there were others. We used Claude and Perplexity to tell us about the spacecraft that reached the moon – but did not survive the landing.
Beresheet (2019)
The Israeli spacecraft, developed by SpaceIL, which originally began operating as part of Google's Prize-X competition to encourage the development of cheap spacecraft, crashed on the lunar surface in April 2019. While crowds across the country and the world watched what was supposed to be a historic landing, technical difficulties during the landing led to the spacecraft hitting the lunar surface at high speed and being lost.
Vikram Lander (2019)
That same year, India launched the Chandrayaan-2 mission, which included one component designed to orbit the Moon in flight, a lander designed to reach the lunar surface, and a probe that was to emerge from the lander and orbit the Moon to explore its South Pole region. However, communication between the Vikram lander and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) was lost during the landing, and it eventually crashed to the lunar surface.
Luna-Globe 1 / Luna 25 (2023)
The Russian Luna-Globe landing mission, or Luna Globe (the last name was the original, and later changed to indicate the fact that it was a continuation of the Russian Luna missions), was planned to land at the south pole of the Moon – but after an unsuccessful maneuver in orbit it crashed into the Moon.
Other missions that ended in a crash included a NASA lander that reached the moon in 2001, collected samples and crashed in the Utah desert in 2004 after failing to open its parachute back to Earth; And a NASA spacecraft designed to collect information about its surface by deliberately crashing a component and measuring the dust cloud it would cause — but the spacecraft that was in orbit around the moon accidentally ejected its fuel reserves, crashing into the moon a few minutes after the component was designed to do so.
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