India’s Moon Landing Makes History at a Relatively Low Cost
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, catalogs the fates of the Soviet Union’s first 11 space missions before the spacecraft successfully landed on the moon as stuck, failed, missed, failed, failed, stuck, failed, crashed, missed, crashed and crashed. Even today—there have been nine moon landings since 2013—achievements are mixed. It just…