NYT seems to have taken BBC's place in throwing shade towards the Indian space program. From the article:

"...The outcomes of the Indian and Israeli missions highlight that lower costs can mean higher risk of failure, which NASA will need to adjust to as it pursues a lower-cost approach...."

Sites like NYT or BBC are highly inept at reporting anything remotely technical in nature. They are good for general political coverage to an extent, but that's where it stops. This is more apparent when the subject matter is closer to our areas of expertise, but even otherwise, it is not too hard to tell that they are out of their depth.

I'm not even sure they do political coverage too well. From the outside it appears the editors live in an insular world that doesn't feel anything like the one outside. They do cover a lot of things, I feel they'd do better if they focused on fewer things but more depth.

(For the BBC at least) Even with the political coverage there seems to be bias that creeps into their reporting

Its pretty factual tbh. If they wanted to throw shade, they could hve brought up indias deplorble acts producing tons of space junk recently.

Apparently Russia was supposed to build the lander but backed out after one of their other landers crashed, which they were basing the Indian one on. So India built their own.

> Although ISRO finalised the payload for Chandrayaan-2 per schedule,[37] the mission was postponed in January 2013[38] and rescheduled to 2016 because Russia was unable to develop the lander on time.[39][40] Roscosmos later withdrew in wake of the failure of the Fobos-Grunt mission to Mars, since the technical aspects connected with the Fobos-Grunt mission were also used in the lunar projects, which needed to be reviewed.[39] When Russia cited its inability to provide the lander even by 2015, India decided to develop the lunar mission independently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2?oldformat=true

Chandrayaan-1 was an impact lander, so it landed on the Moon in a "controlled manner" (ie on purpose). Apparently the lander was painted with the Indian flag[1].

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20090112054329/http://economicti...

What's the point of an impact lantern?

You still get video and sensor readings from the flight, you get a dust plume to analyze from a distance (especially with bigger impactors also giving you data about what's below the surface).

Even making it that far is a testament to the prowess of your space organization. It's a cheaper first step which probably directly and indirectly tests some 75% of the components needed for an actual landing.