The instant news arrived on planet Earth that Russia’s Luna 25 spacecraft had crashed into the moon, and 50,000 Western journalists began overheating their keyboards. Any Russian mishap causes a feeding frenzy at Russophobia propaganda mission control, somewhere deep under the White House. And now, Art Technica has proclaimed Russian President Vladimir Putin “a disastrous space leader.” Meanwhile, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale (Bullwinkle and Rocky’s arch enemies) are disheartened their Fearless Leader might be slipping.
When I read the headline “The failure of Luna 25 cements Putin’s role as a disastrous space leader,” a vision came over me. For an instant, I saw Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov and President Putin chuckling a repeating one after the other Kosmicheskiy lider (Space leader). Just when all 8 billion of us knew things couldn’t get nuttier, Russia’s leader is no good in space, either. In all seriousness, we are at a point where the propaganda circus is all about the clowns entertaining us. There is no longer (if there ever was) any substance to the rubbing.
But wait. What about Sergey Valerievich, Soyuz MS-22 TPK commander and ISS-68 commander, up in space with his colleagues Dmitry Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio? What about Boeing and NASA being unable to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX because of goof-ups like lining the inside of the Starliner cabin with flammable tape? So far, Boeing has reported a staggering $1.1 billion in losses on the Starliner. Does this make President Joe Biden an evil space commander too?
What about looking back in history? When the Spacecraft Challenger disintegrated 46,000 feet (14 km) above the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven astronauts, was Ronald Reagan impeached over faulty booster expansion o-rings? Then there was Apollo 1, which caught fire in a practice run on the launch pad, killing all three U.S. astronauts. It was 1967, and President Lyndon Johnson was not labeled a bad space commander-in-chief! Even when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board in 2003, George W. Bush wasn’t blamed or even embarrassed.
The first U.S.S.R. mission to explore the planet Venus (Venera 1 and Venera 2) were lost in space due to failed telemetry. Still, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was not transformed into some version of a fumbling Darth Vader. The Soviets pressed on and eventually launched the first human-made probe (Venera 7) to transmit data from the surface of Venus.
One can only imagine what would have changed had Popular Mechanics or another scientific magazine labeled Khrushchev or his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, “disastrous space leaders!”
So, Luna 25 malfunctions, and the spacecraft smashes into the moon. The overall cost to the Russians is about $130 million. And, of course, Vladimir Putin cannot take command of space for a while longer. Ars Technica, interestingly, is a subsidiary of Advanced Publications, which is owned the mega-rich Newhouse family, descendants of immigrants from the Russian Empire.
The BRICS are meeting in South Africa to reshuffle the way we do things here on Earth potentially, and the top tech story of the day is Russia’s Luna 25 being the 61st failed mission to the moon.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.