Mission Summary
Kosmos 60 was yet another Soviet attempt to soft-land on the Moon, one more failure in the long Ye-6 campaign that would not succeed until Luna 9. Launched March 12, 1965, it carried the small egg-shaped capsule designed to settle onto the lunar surface and return the first photographs from it.
The spacecraft reached a parking orbit around Earth, but the Blok L upper stage that was to send it toward the Moon never fired. Investigators suspected a short circuit in the electric converter of the I-100 control system, the single unit that governed both the booster stage and the spacecraft, which kept the engine from igniting.
Stranded in orbit, the probe received the catch-all Kosmos designation the Soviets applied to spacecraft that reached Earth orbit but failed to leave it, obscuring its true purpose. It decayed five days later. The recurring I-100 trouble would soon push engineers to redesign the control system entirely.
Sources and notes can be found on the Sources page.
