Mission Summary
This spacecraft was the fifth Soviet attempt to soft-land on the Moon, launched April 20, 1964. Like the four tries before it, it carried the egg-shaped lander capsule meant to survive a touchdown and transmit the first images from the lunar surface, and like them it never reached the Moon.
The flight was aborted during the ascent to Earth orbit when the launch vehicle’s third-stage engine shut down prematurely, only 50 seconds into its burn. Investigators traced the failure to a broken circuit between a battery in the fourth stage, which powered the third-stage engine, and the I-100 guidance unit, a fault that cut off the engine’s power.
The spacecraft failed to reach orbit; United States Air Force radars in Turkey monitored the failed launch from afar. It was the fifth consecutive Ye-6 failure, a measure of how stubbornly the soft-landing goal eluded Soviet engineers. That achievement would finally come with Luna 9 in February 1966.
Sources and notes can be found on the Sources page.
