Project Horizon was shuttered due to cost overruns. Had it succeeded, it would have militarized the lunar surface as well as the space domain. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet ...

After this, many aspects of the grand Soviet space program floundered and began to disintegrate, including the ambitious Zvezda (Russian: “ звезда”, meaning “star”) Moon base.

By 1959, Luna 2 crash-landed on the moon — the first man-made object on the lunar surface — and by October of that year a third probe circled around and photographed the far side of the moon.

The first domestically produced moon probe in modern Russia history, Luna-25 was important in both political and scientific terms. The implications of its failure are likely to be considerable.

EVEN before Sputnik, Soviet scientists were freely predicting successful space flights to the moon by the early 1960s. Since the launching of their satellite, the timetable has been confidently ...