{"id":4200,"date":"2026-04-07T13:53:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T13:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/4200\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T13:53:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T13:53:07","slug":"russia-delays-lunar-missions-as-us-marks-historic-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/4200\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia Delays Lunar Missions as US Marks Historic Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

MOSCOW, April 7 (Reuters) – Russia has \u2060pushed \u2060back the launch of \u2060three moon missions, the Interfax news \u200bagency said on Tuesday, a setback to its ambitious lunar \u200cexploration programme as longtime \u200cspace rival, the United States, celebrated an historic \u2060flight \u2060around the moon.<\/p>\n

The launches of Russian spacecraft\u00a0Luna-28, Luna-29, and \u200bLuna-30 have been postponed to 2032\u20132036, Interfax quoted Russian Academy of Sciences Vice President Sergei Chernyshev as saying.<\/p>\n

It did \u200bnot say when they had originally been slated to \u2060lift \u2060off, but the unexplained \u2060delays \u200bfollow postponements last year to other Russian lunar and space \u200bmissions and the \u2060crash of its unmanned Luna-25 craft into the surface of the moon in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Russia sees lunar exploration as vital to its national interests, the head \u2060of Russia’s space agency Roskosmos said after the failed 2023\u00a0mission, \u2060saying the race was on to develop the moon’s natural resources.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0and, increasingly, China.<\/p>\n

This week, four \u2060astronauts from NASA’s Artemis II mission were the first to fly around the moon in over 50 years, travelling further into space than any \u200bhumans before them.<\/p>\n

(Reporting by Reuters, Writing by \u200bAlessandra PrenticeEditing by Ros Russell)<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 Thomson Reuters.<\/p>\n

Photos You Should See \u2013 April 2026<\/p>\n

\"NASA's<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MOSCOW, April 7 (Reuters) – Russia has \u2060pushed \u2060back the launch of \u2060three moon missions, the Interfax news…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4201,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[515,214,158,5,289,58,173],"class_list":{"0":"post-4200","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-collections-world","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-reuters","11":"tag-russia","12":"tag-space","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/russia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}