The Luna-25 mission will seek to land near the south pole of the moon, collecting geological samples from the area, and sending back data for signs of water or its building blocks, which could raise the possibility of a future human colony on the moon.

      • Luna-25 launched on a Soyuz rocket, which is actually derived from an ICBM in the R-7 family. There aren’t any active ICBMs in that family anymore, and it seems like their newer liquid fueled ICBMs use different fuels and engines. They could share avionics, structures, and upper stages, but the heavy lifting is done pretty differently.

        *As far as I can tell from memory and a quick Wikipedia scan

    •  zhunk   ( @zhunk@beehaw.org ) 
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      61 year ago

      So, the ISS still relies on the Russian side to stay up. Russian Progress spacecraft do most of the reboosting for it to stay in orbit. It stinks, but that’s still the reality up there. At least the war got every Western satellite off Russian rockets, but we’re still doing crew exchanges, where a Roscomos Cosmonaut flies on a SpaceX Dragon 2 and a NASA Astronaut flies on a Soyuz.

      I wish NASA would have been able to fund ISS replacements sooner so we could get out of there before 2030.