Russia in the cold in the new Moon race

Hello! After the success of NASA’s Artemis II lunar flyby mission, The Bell looks at how the Soviet Union lost the Cold War space race, and why Moscow is barely even a player in the modern race to the moon.

NASA’s moon success an embarrassing reminder of Russia’s space woes

The success of the first manned mission to orbit the moon in decades, Artemis II, has sparked renewed public interest in spaceflight around the world. For Russia, it proved an embarrassing marker of how far behind Moscow is — in echoes of how it slipped behind the Americans in the 1960s, never the recover. Despite Yuri Gagarin being the first man in space, the United States beat the Soviets to land a man on the moon, and by the mid-1970s the Soviet lunar program had been suspended. It stayed that way for 50 years, until in 2023 Russia tried to send an uncrewed lander to the moon, only for it to crash into the surface.