(Also describes the recent failures of Israeli, India, and Japan.
Easy to fail, because this is HARD stuff.)

from
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/08/20/russias-bid-to-return-to-the-moon-comes-to-an-ignominious-end

Russia’s bid to return to the Moon comes to an ignominious end
All eyes now turn to India

image: afp
Aug 20th 2023

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Arash of small, fresh craters across the lunar surface testifies to the
international rush to return to the Moon by means of robot spacecraft.
In April 2019 the gyroscopes on Beresheet, built by a public-private
Israeli partnership, failed during the craft’s descent towards a patch
of Mare Serenitatis, causing it to crash. In September that year
Chandrayaan-2, a mission by the Indian space agency, isro, departed from
trajectory towards its landing site, not far from the Moon’s south pole.
The result was what isro’s chief called “a hard landing”—one
sufficiently hard for the probe to have never been heard from again.
This April a mission by ispace, a Japanese company, ended shortly after
the hakuto-r spacecraft decided that it had reached the surface of Mare
Frigoris while still 5km above it, and turned off its engines. The
Moon’s gravity is weaker than the Earth’s, but not by so much that a
spacecraft can weather a fall from that distance.

On the morning of August 20th Russia announced that it had joined the
ranks of the new crater-makers. Its Luna 25 mission, launched on August
11th, entered orbit around the Moon on August 16th. It was due to
undertake its landing five days later. But on August 19th, just after
its controllers had told it to adjust its orbit in preparation, contact
with the probe was lost. On the morning of August 20th Roscosmos, the
Russian space agency, announced that “a deviation between the actual and
calculated parameters of the propulsion manoeuvre led the Luna 25
spacecraft to enter an undesignated orbit and it ceased to exist
following a collision with the surface of the Moon”.