There is now another country capable of dramatic success in space.
It was fairly obvious that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was confident. You don’t include a window showing the prime minister’s real-time reaction in the live YouTube feed of your lunar landing unless you think you are going to give him something to smile about.
Even so, the poise with which Chandrayaan-3’s “automatic landing sequence” brought the spacecraft down on to the Moon’s surface was striking. The spacecraft’s trajectory dropped smoothly from thousands of kilometres an hour to walking pace, before a last little cheeky hover as the system checked the landing site and then settled itself down onto the lunar surface. India did not just land its robot on the Moon. It did it with style.
Mission control in Bangalore erupted in cheers. In his screen on the wall the far from effusive prime minister, Narendra Modi, allowed himself a smile and waved a little Indian flag to the assembled engineers and worldwide audience. Speaking shortly afterwards from Johannesburg in South Africa, where he is attending the BRICS summit, Mr Modi relayed the success with the motto that India has chosen for its presidency of the G20 group: “One earth, one family, one future”. Built on that “human-centric” approach, and “welcomed universally”, Mr Modi crowed, India’s success belonged to all humanity.
As with most successes in space nominally undertaken, as the plaque at the Apollo 11 landing site puts it, “for all mankind”, the question of who was actually responsible was not insignificant. For all the talk of universalism, Mr Modi was keen to stress that the achievement was also the “victory cry of a new India”. The Moon mission is portrayed and seen in India as the sort of achievement that only a great nation can undertake, bolstering its sense of itself as a nation that others can look to as a leader. With the next general election less than a year away, this self-image fits perfectly with Mr Modi’s nationalist message.
The success makes India one of four countries to have landed on the Moon, the other three being America, China, and the Soviet Union. The list of still-extant countries capable of such landings, though, only reaches three. In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Union landed sophisticated rovers on the Moon and even returned samples from its surface. Although it inherited the lion’s share of the Soviet space programme in 1991, Russia has never managed anything comparable.
Roscosmos, ISRO’s Russian counterpart, wanted to break that duck this summer by landing a spacecraft on the Moon a couple of days before India. But on August 19th it lost control of Luna 25 while the spacecraft was still in orbit; the spacecraft subsequently crashed.
There was a time when India was a junior partner to Russia in matters lunar. Ten years ago Russia was slated to provide the lander for India’s previous Moon mission, Chandrayaan-2.
But the subsequent loss of a Russian mission to Mars saw India go it alone. And though in 2019 Chandrayaan-2’s Indian-built lander failed in its landing attempt, the fact that its successor accomplished what Russia just failed to do strongly suggests India was wise to do so. In this respect, it is a pity that an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court has seen Vladimir Putin restrict his presence in Johannesburg to a virtual one. There would have been a piquancy in his having to congratulate Mr Modi face to face.
Xi Jinping, who is also in Johannesburg, will have had no such worries. China’s Moon programme is comfortably more advanced than India’s. China is the only other country to have landed on the Moon this century (Israeli and Japanese missions have both failed, though a new mission will be launched by Japan on August 26th). It is also the only country with a 100% success rate in Moon missions. China has returned samples from the Moon’s surface and has landed on its far side, an impressive first.
Though India is claiming a similar status for its landing on the basis that it is at the Moon’s south pole, a place where there is high likelihood of ice deposits, this is a stretch. Chandrayaan-3 landed at 70ºS, a higher latitude than any previous mission, but that is still about 600km from the pole proper. The only peculiarly polar aspect to the mission is the fact that the solar panel on its rover is mounted vertically to catch the oblique rays of the low hanging Sun.)
Unlike India, China boasts the wherewithal to put astronauts into orbit, and even has a small space station of its own for them to occupy while up there. That allows it to talk, as America does, of a crewed mission to the Moon by the end of this decade, though it is an ambitious challenge.
India’s first launch of astronauts on a rocket of its own is slated for late 2024 or 2025. When and how any of them might get to the Moon remains to be seen. During Mr Modi’s visit to Washington in June various plans for future space co-operation were unveiled, including a flight to the International Space Station by an Indian astronaut on a SpaceX rocket paid for by NASA. India has also signed on to America’s “Artemis accords”, a set of principles intended to co-ordinate lunar aspirations that Russia and China have rejected.
Indian astronauts joining American-led missions to the Moon remain a far-off prospect. For now, though, there is a small sense in which India is ahead of the Apollo veteran. America has plans to send robots to the Moon before sending astronauts later this decade, but as yet it has not launched any of them. At the moment, only Asia is represented on the Moon.
India’s lander is not as impressive as what America has planned, or what China already has there. But along with its little rover, due to be deployed shortly after landing, it is quite enough to captivate the audience that peppered ISRO’s YouTube live chat with gleeful emojis and endless repetitions of “Jai Hind” (Long live India). And they will do nothing to hurt Mr Modi’s prospects as a voice abroad and a leader at home.■
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