Russia delays lunar missions as US marks historic flight
المصدر: ARY News EN | Source: ARY News ENRussia has pushed back the launch of three moon missions, the Interfax news agency said on Tuesday, a setback to its ambitious lunar exploration programme as longtime space rival, the United States, celebrated an historic flight around the moon.
The launches of Russian spacecraft Luna-28, Luna-29, and Luna-30 have been postponed to 2032–2036, Interfax quoted Russian Academy of Sciences Vice President Sergei Chernyshev as saying.
It did not say when they had originally been slated to lift off, but the unexplained delays follow postponements last year to other Russian lunar and space missions and the crash of its unmanned Luna-25 craft into the surface of the moon in 2023.
Russia sees lunar exploration as vital to its national interests, the head of Russia’s space agency Roskosmos said after the failed 2023 mission, saying the race was on to develop the moon’s natural resources.
The Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite and sent the first human into space in the 1960s, but Russia’s once mighty space programme has declined in the post-Soviet era, falling behind the U.S. and, increasingly, China.
This week, four astronauts from NASA’s Artemis II mission were the first to fly around the moon in over 50 years, travelling further into space than any humans before them.
ملاحظة تحريرية | Editorial Note: نُشر هذا المقال في الأصل بواسطة ARY News EN. خبر (Khabr) هي منصة إعلامية أردنية مرخّصة تعمل بالذكاء الاصطناعي. نضيف قيمة تحريرية من خلال: تحليل ذكي للأخبار، ملخصات تلقائية، رواية صوتية بالذكاء الاصطناعي، ترجمة متعددة اللغات، وتدقيق الحقائق. هدفنا جعل الأخبار أكثر وضوحاً وسهولةً للقارئ العربي.
This article was originally published by ARY News EN. Khabr is a licensed Jordanian AI-powered news platform (Registration #82086). We add editorial value through: AI-powered news analysis, automated summaries, AI audio narration, multi-language translation (Arabic, English, French, Turkish), and AI fact-checking. Our mission is to make news more accessible and understandable for Arabic-speaking audiences worldwide.



