Russia's first moon mission in 47 years failed when its Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed into the moon.

Ground crew reportedly lost contact with the craft at 11:57 GMT on Saturday after a problem as the craft was shunted into pre-landing orbit, Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos said in a statement. A soft landing had been planned for Monday.

"The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon," Roscosmos said.

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It said a special inter-departmental commission had been set up to investigate the reasons for the loss of the Luna-25 craft, whose mission had raised hopes in Moscow that Russia was returning to the big power moon race.

Russia's space capabilities have declined since the days when Moscow was the first to launch a satellite to orbit the Earth - Sputnik 1, in 1957 - and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space in 1961.

It also comes as Russia's $2 trillion economy faces its significant external challenges: The pressure of both Western sanctions and fighting the biggest land war in Europe since World War Two.

Yesterday and tomorrow's space race

Though moon missions are notoriously difficult, with many U.S. and Soviet Union attempts having failed in the past, Russia had not attempted a moon mission since Luna-24 in 1976, when leader Leonid Brezhnev was in charge at the Kremlin.

Russia had been racing against India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to land on the moon's south pole this week.

As news of the Luna-25 failure broke, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) posted on X, formerly Twitter, that Chandrayaan-3 was set to land on August 23.

Russian officials had hoped that the Luna-25 mission would show Russia can compete with the superpowers in space despite its program's post-Soviet Union decline.

"The flight control system was a vulnerable area, which had to go through many fixes," said Anatoly Zak, the creator and publisher of www.RussianSpaceWeb.com which tracks Russian space programs.

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