India is over the Moon, and justifiably so. The successful soft-landing achieved by Chandrayaan-3’s Vikam lander makes the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) a first among equals. Among the four countries that have managed to land safely on the lunar surface (the US, Russia, and China make up the rest of the club), India is the first to have landed on the Moon’s south pole. How quickly, and how far, India has climbed the space ladder is evident from the fact that just over a decade ago in 2011-12—when the Chandrayaan-2 mission was originally sceheduled to commence—the lander and the rover were to come from Russia as India didn’t have indigenous ones. The Russian lander was a version of Luna-25 that crashed on to the lunar south pole earlier this week. Chandrayaan-3’s lander and rover are, of course, India-developed—the learnings from Chandrayaan-2’s partial failure seem to have been imbibed well.
A soft lunar landing is a difficult task to manage. The virtual lack of atmosphere and weak gravity make orchestrating a safe descent an extreme-precision event. A lander must rely on the fixed quantum of propellant mix it is carrying, its optical infrastructure and sensors solely. Lunar dust complicates the proper functioning of the latter two. Landing on the southern polar region of the Moon is an even more fraught proposal, compared with the equatorial soft-landings achieved so far. The terrain here is rough, with many trenches and craters; some areas have been in perpetual darkness and experience temperatures as low as -250oC that can cause key electronics to fail. Against such a backdrop, India becoming the first have landed safely is historic.
The Moon landing exercise was an important one not just from the perspective of testing and demonstrating technological prowess in executing something this difficult, it was also about reaffirming the value of public-private cooperation for space exploration—for scientific as well as commercial purposes. Chandrayaan-3’s lander and rover were built by a consortium of private space firms, in collaboration with Isro. The ground control systems, too, were a product of Isro and private sector partnership. Even as private sector participation in Europe, the US, Israel, and Japan, is setting new milestones, India’s seems to be still in the ‘just after blast-off’ stage. The pool of participants is also not nearly as big as that of others, though there has been rapid addition in numbers in recent years.
Despite Isro’s long list of successes, that too, at a fraction of the costs incurred for similar endeavours by competing space agencies, India accounts for just 2% of the global space industry. And, with the US government spending $62 billion on space activities in 2022 and China $12 billion compared to India’s $2 billion, the need for expanding private-sector participation is quite clear. The new Space Policy, which aims to establish a “flourishing commercial presence in space”, has made India’s intent clear.
This has become even more urgent now with the Artemis Accords (AA)—which flow from the US’s Artemis programme that aims to build human colonies on the Moon—finding more and more takers. While the Artemis Accords call for extraction and utilisation of space resources to be done in a safe and sustainable manner and in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty, the Accords also arguably make inroads into generating global consensus on commercial exploitation of the Moon’s resources. Three AA signatories (the US, Luxembourg, and the UAE) already have domestic laws to allow their private sector to mine from celestial bodies.
India, which became the latest signatory to the Accords in June this year, can’t afford to fall behind. A Moon mission that demonstrates sufficient ambition to enthuse private sector participation and prod top space agencies to collaborate with Isro is the need of the hour. Chandrayaan-3’s successful landing pushes up the prospects of exploration of lunar region that is rich in volatiles (chemicals that melt/evaporate at moderate temperatures), and pioneering work here could do both.