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India takes another shot at moon landing as outer space race heats up

  • India’s space agency is preparing to launch the Chandrayaan-3 that includes a lander designed to deploy a rover near the lunar south pole
  • Experts say the mission also signals the country is open for business in the accelerating private sector space race

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India’s moon mission in 2020 successfully deployed an orbiter but its lander and rover were destroyed in a crash. File photo: ISRO via AP
Reuters
India’s space agency is readying to launch a rocket as soon as Friday that will attempt to land a rover on the moon and mark the country’s arrival as a power in space exploration and the new frontier of space commerce.

Only the United States, the former Soviet Union and China have made successful lunar landings. An attempt by a Japanese start-up earlier this year ended with the lander crashing.

Built on a budget of just under US$75 million, the Chandrayaan-3 is set to blast-off from India’s main spaceport in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh at 2.35pm (local time).

If everything goes to plan, a 43.5m (143ft) LVM3 launch rocket will blast the spacecraft into an elliptical Earth orbit before it loops toward the moon for a scheduled landing around August 23.

The launch by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is the country’s first major mission since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government announced policies to spur investment in private space launches and related satellite-based businesses.

India wants its space companies to increase their share of the global launch market by fivefold within the next decade, officials have said, up from 2 per cent by revenue in 2020.

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