Russia will give up soil probes on the Moon and the Phobos as the Mars satellite under the 2025 federal space program, if it finds no support for these projects from the European space corporation, according to a draft federal space program released on Thursday.

The program draft was prepared by Russia’s space corporation (Roscosmos) for submission to the Russian government for approval. "The launches will be implemented only with the participation of the European Space Agency in the project," says the note to the Moon-29/Moon-Grunt and Bumerang projects.

The Bumerang/Expedition-M project is the repetition of the Phobos-Grunt (Phobos-Soil) project that ended in a failure in 2011. The project aims to establish an interplanetary station to survey Mars and its satellites and deliver Phobos soil samples to the Earth. The spacecraft can be launched in 2024, if the European Space Agency cooperates with Roscosmos in this project.

The Moon-Grunt (Moon-Soil) project envisages using a special device to collect and place soil samples from the Moon’s southern pole into a thermostatic chamber and deliver them to the Earth. Given the ESA’s participation, the launch of this space vehicle is scheduled for 2024. Also, the document introduces new numeration of Russian lunar missions expected for implementation until 2025.

Specifically, the Moon-Grunt project was enumerated as No. 28, which has now been assigned to the back-up project Moon-Resource Landing Vehicle: two landing stations will be sent at once to the Earth’s satellite in 2021: Moon-27 and its back-up vehicle Moon-28.

Previously, the back-up vehicle had no number of its own. There are plans for 2019 to launch a spacecraft as part of the project Moon-Globe (Moon-25) and for 2020 to launch a space vehicle under the project Moon-Resource Landing Vehicle (Moon-26).

The previous draft of the federal space program prepared by Roscosmos in April 2015 envisaged plans to launch the Moon-26 vehicle in 2021 and the Moon-27 spacecraft and the back-up vehicle at the beginning and at the end of 2022.