# Two consecutive high profile Moon landings fail, any common threads?

For the second time in a few months, we have seen a Moon landing fail at the last moment as computer communications failed. The Beresheet failure is well addressed here; did a similar thing happen with Chandrayaan-2?

• Beresheet was a spacecraft failure resulting in loss of redundancy with the situation made fatal by a ground command error. It's kind of improbable that the same thing happened again. At least I hope so. Sep 7 '19 at 1:47
• This occurred to me too, but as I mentioned in the first sentence of How vulnerable could space launch vehicles be to a “lone gunman”?, it seems that "space is (still) hard".
– uhoh
Sep 7 '19 at 3:46
• The main common threads are "landing" and "on the Moon". That combination (as pointed out in Bankroll's answer), is more than enough reason. Oct 30 at 8:43

Failures with space satellite missions to other planets is very common.

Planet     Total Missions  (Success-Failure ratio)  Success %

Mercury         2                (2-0)               100%

Venus          50               (32-18)               64%

The Moon      109               (61-48)               58%

Mars           50               (22-28)               44%

Saturn          4                (4-0)               100%


More success with Venus than Mars was the direct result of less attempted landings. Most failures are with landing.

One of the articles said that reaching Mercury was more difficult than reaching Pluto.