Russia’s Roscosmos space agency said it had lost contact with the probe shortly after a problem occurred Saturday while it was headed into a pre-salting orbit.

“The system moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist after impact with the lunar surface,” Roscosmos said in a statement on Sunday.

The agency notes that a special interdepartmental commission has been formed to investigate the causes of the loss of the spacecraft.

The failure of the mission underscores the decline of Russia’s space prowess since its Cold War heyday, when Moscow first launched a satellite into Earth orbit – Sputnik 1 in 1957 – and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. in 1961.

Russia has not attempted a mission to the moon since the Luna-24 mission in 1976, when Leonid Brezhnev was in charge of the Kremlin.

According to Russian cosmonauts, Luna-25 was supposed to land on the south pole of the Moon, scheduled for Monday, August 21.

Russia is competing with India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is due to land on the moon’s south pole this week, as well as China and the United States, both of which intend to send spacecraft and then people to the moon.

Last June, the head of Roscosmos Yuriy Borisov admitted to President Vladimir Putin that the Luna-25 mission was “risky.”

“The probability of success of such missions is estimated at about 70%,” he said of the probe, which weighed almost 800 kilograms.

The mission was supposed to give a new boost to Russia’s space sector, which has been plagued by funding problems and corruption scandals for years and is now isolated by the conflict in Ukraine.

For his part, Vladimir Putin has promised to continue Russia’s space program despite difficulties in this field, taking as an example the sending of the USSR’s first man into space in the tense context of 1961, at the height of the Cold War.