Russian rocket "Soyuz 2.1 b" with lunar station "Luna-25" was successfully launched from Vostochny cosmodrome and put into orbit.

This is the first lunar station to be launched by Russia in its modern history, that is, after the collapse of the USSR.

The flight to the Moon will take 4.5 to 5.5 days. On the lunar polar orbit the station will stay from 3 days to a week after which it will make a soft landing.

Luna 25 took flight at 8:10 a.m. local time Friday, or 7:10 p.m. ET Thursday.

Residents of a Russian village were temporarily evacuated Friday morning since there is a “one in a million chance” that one of Luna 25’s rocket stages could fall there, according to Reuters

The spacecraft is expected to first enter an orbit around Earth before transferring to a lunar orbit and ultimately descending to the surface of the moon. Russia’s last lunar lander, Luna 24, landed on the moon on August 18, 1976.

Luna 25 and India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission, which launched in mid-July, are both expected to land at the lunar south pole on August 23, and it’s a race to see which country will land first, according to Reuters. But Roscomos said the two missions are not expected to cause a problem for each other because their specific landing zones differ, Reuters reported.

Watch the video that I posted right before this one, about this launch.  https://www.brighteon.com/4f189d37-a9e9-47f2-9581-b7cd5570deed