Like Japan And Israel Previously, Now Russia's Luna 25 Lander Has Crashed Into The Moon. A Complete Loss.

This obviously underscores what an amazing accomplishment the Apollo missions of now a half-century ago were -- and the Mars robotic ones. . . are.

Space is. . . indeed hard. It doesn't cooperate. And without live pilots aboard to course correct, the automated ones. . . are prone to miscalculations. Of course, with live pilots aboard, the risk of loss of human life is. . . ever present. Here's NPR's take on it all:

. . .The Russian space agency says its Luna-25 spacecraft has crashed into the moon.

Russia's unmanned robot lander crashed after it had spun into uncontrolled orbit, the country's space agency Roscosmos reported.

The launch earlier this month was Russia's first since 1976 when it was part of the Soviet Union. The crash comes after Roscosmos reported an "abnormal situation" that its specialists were analyzing on Saturday.

"During the operation, an abnormal situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters," Roscosmos said in a Telegram post. . . .

Now you know. And there is no shame in any of this. The "dare mighty things" motto here applies: that requires that we must accept there will be failures. Many of them. Onward, just the same.

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