VLADIVOSTOK, September 12. /TASS/. The Luna-25 had a difficult mission, and its failure doesn’t mean the program has come to an end, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the Eastern Economic Forum.

"As for landing on the spot, where no one had ever landed, well, yes, it was a difficult job. It will undergo a proper analysis, and the work will be continued," he said during a question-and-answer session at the EEF.

He expressed regret that the spacecraft had failed to land on the Moon, but said "this does not mean that we will end this program. We will carry on the work."

Putin said that space exploration is a complex, demanding job involving high technologies.

"Not only we have made some progress there, we have excellent expertise," he stated.

The president said thing had gone wrong in space exploration for other countries as well, even with more severe consequences than Russia’s loss of the Luna-25.

"Of course, it is always associated with the unknown. So there is nothing very unusual here, although we would like everything to have succeeded this time. But we will continue this work. We will even double down in some areas," the president said.

The Soyuz-2.1b carrier vehicle with the Luna-25 automatic probe was launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome at 2:10 a.m. Moscow time on August 11. On August 12 and 14, the automatic probe adjusted its flight path twice. The apparatus entered a near-lunar orbit on Wednesday, August 16, and its landing on the surface of the Moon was slated for August 21.

However, communication with the lunar lander was lost after the spacecraft received an impulse to activate its pre-landing elliptical orbit on August 19.

Roscosmos Director General Yury Borisov said that an ad hoc commission had been set up to investigate the causes of the failed Luna-25 mission. He specified that the abnormal operation of the lunar probe’s thrusters in its orbit adjustment was behind the automatic station’s crash: The engines operated for 127 seconds instead of the scheduled 84.