Mission Summary
This unnamed probe, the third spacecraft of the Soviet Ye-6 soft-landing series, was lost shortly after launch on February 3, 1963 and never reached orbit. Like the attempt a month earlier, it was built to make the first controlled landing on the Moon and return images from the surface.
A Molniya booster lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, but about a hundred seconds into the flight the rocket began to lose attitude control, first along the pitch axis and then in yaw after the core stage separated. Carrying the probe, the upper stages traced an arc and fell back through the atmosphere.
The vehicle reentered over the Pacific Ocean near Midway Island, destroying the spacecraft before it could earn a name or designation. Investigators traced the failure to the I-100 control system, which had fed incorrect data to the booster’s trajectory control. The loss was the second Ye-6 failure in barely a month, and several more would follow before the program placed a working lander on the Moon.
Sources and notes can be found on the Sources page.
