BENGALURU, July 13 (Portal) – India’s space agency is preparing to launch a rocket as early as Friday that is set to attempt to land a rover on the moon, marking the country’s arrival as a power in space exploration and a new frontier of the… to mark space trade.
Only the USA, the former Soviet Union and China managed to land on the moon. An attempt by a Japanese start-up earlier this year ended in the lander crashing.
Built on a budget of just under US$75 million, Chandrayaan-3 is scheduled to launch at 14:35 local time (09:05 GMT) from India’s main spaceport in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
India’s highly anticipated Chandrayaan-3 lunar mission is scheduled to launch on July 14, 2023.
If all goes according to plan, a 43.5-meter (143-foot) LVM3 launch vehicle will launch the spacecraft into an elliptical Earth orbit before heading toward the moon for a scheduled landing around August 23.
The launch by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is the country’s first major mission since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government announced measures to boost investment in private space launches and related satellite-based companies.
India wants its space companies to quintuple their share of the global launch vehicle market within the next decade, government officials say, up from 2% of sales in 2020.
Chandrayaan, which means ‘lunar vehicle’ in Sanskrit, comprises a 2m high lander designed to station a rover near the lunar south pole, where it is expected to remain operational for two weeks and conduct a series of experiments.
But analysts say the launch also has a secondary purpose: to signal that India is open to business in the accelerating private space race.
“A successful mission will strengthen India’s global standing and bring indirect benefits to the commercial aspect of the industry,” said Ajey Lele, consultant at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defense Studies and Analyzes in New Delhi.
India’s highly anticipated Chandrayaan-3 lunar mission is scheduled to launch on July 14, 2023. The Soviet Union, the United States and China are the only three countries that have managed to perform soft landings on the moon.
An orbiter was successfully deployed on the ISRO Chandrayan-2 mission in 2020, but its lander and rover were destroyed in a crash near where Chandrayan-3 will attempt a landing.
Since 2020, when India opened up to private launches, the number of space startups has more than doubled. Late last year Skyroot Aerospace, whose investors include Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, launched India’s first privately built rocket.
During a visit to the United States last month, Modi and US President Joe Biden pledged to deepen cooperation in space.
Voyager Space, a Denver-based company with a NASA contract to develop the proposed Starlab space station, said this week it has signed a memorandum of understanding with ISRO to deploy Indian rockets and is exploring opportunities for collaborations with Indian space start-ups seek.
“India regards space as a strategic asset and aims to become one of the leading players in space,” said Carla Filotico, managing director of consulting firm SpaceTec Partners.
“This could be India’s chance to be one of the pioneers in this industry.”
Reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee in Bengaluru; Edited by Kevin Krolicki and Jamie Freed
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