“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the English novelist L.P. Hartley wrote famously in his 1953 novel The Go-Between. In a peculiar twist, the same cannot be said of the Moon. It is not a foreign country, or even a foreign world: the U.S.’s manoeuvring to beat China to the satellite has increasingly meant the Moon is an extension of the Earth’s geopolitics and political culture.

At the ninth India-U.S. Civil Space Joint Working Group meeting at Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) headquarters last week, NASA invited the organisation to participate in its ‘Moon Base’ programme, ostensibly as part of the two countries’ Artemis Accords partnership. According to NASA, the facility will be built piece by piece near the Moon’s south pole, where sunlight is available for longer durations and where permanently shadowed craters hold significant water-ice deposits. The target is for it to be humankind’s first outpost on a new celestial body, taking shape around 2030.

NASA is leaning heavily on private industry for this, having already awarded contracts to Astrolab (worth $219 million) and Lunar Outpost ($220 million) for lunar terrain vehicles, Blue Origin ($188 million) for delivery task orders, and Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines ($600 million) for four robotic missions to the Moon to deliver equipment. Intuitive is also developing a relay satellite under a separate contract.

Further, as part of NASA chief Jared Isaacman’s overhaul of the Artemis programme earlier this year, in no small part responding to the Trump administration’s December 2025 space policy calling for securing U.S. interests in cislunar space, the profiles of the Artemis III and IV Missions changed. Now, Mission III will be a crewed test flight in Earth orbit in 2027 and Mission IV will attempt the first lunar landing under the programme in 2028. Taken together, the ‘Moon Base’ is effectively the next phase of the new Artemis programme, tasked with keeping — intermittently at first, and eventually continuously — Artemis astronauts on the Moon.

Deepening partnership

Since India signed the Artemis Accords in 2023, NASA and ISRO have engaged regularly across several areas. NASA has trained India’s astronaut candidates for the ‘Gaganyaan’ human spaceflight mission. In 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Donald Trump jointly announced a broader strategic technologies framework, including spaceflight.

ISRO also launched the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, a major scientific mission that has been a decade in the making. NASA instruments are slated to fly on forthcoming Chandrayaan missions just as they did on the first three.

While it seems almost facile to suggest the U.S. also engage with China considering the latter’s formidable spaceflight capabilities — many industry experts agree the age of U.S. dominance in spaceflight is in its twilight years — the two countries’ actions mean that the lines they have drawn on the Earth are set to be extended to the Moon, and that will pose new challenges for India.

In 2021, China and Russia announced plans to cooperate on an ‘International Lunar Research Station’ (ILRS), which China described as a long-term lunar science and technology facility, also to be built near the south pole and with a targeted deadline of 2035. Like the Artemis Accords, the ILRS is an international effort, currently involving 17 countries and organisations and more than 50 research institutions worldwide.

Earlier this year, when NASA solicited proposals for payloads to send to the Moon, it said it welcomed foreign entities “except those with bilateral ties to China”. NASA’s FY2027 budget request has also described the ‘Moon Base’ as a means to establish U.S. “superiority on the Moon” and to preserve U.S. leadership in space — language with more strategic overtones relative to the agency’s pre-Trump rhetoric.

Given how much of U.S. policy is shaped by out-competing China, India’s gains or losses will not be restricted to its space programme either. For instance, ISRO’s engagement with NASA has arguably become more politicised thanks to NASA’s own politicisation by virtue of having to respond to China’s ILRS plans. Contrary to the focus areas of these bodies through much of their histories, future discussions would be poorly served by treating their engagement on the Moon as purely exploratory.

For example, the Artemis Accords do not say a signatory cannot cooperate with non-signatory countries. (In June, ISRO also hosted the BRICS Heads of Space Agencies meeting in Bengaluru with China among the participants). However, the Artemis programme itself is increasingly concerned with infrastructure, and building one’s components, equipment, tools, etc. to be interoperable with that infrastructure will thus extend geopolitical alignments on the Earth to the Moon.

Suppose China invites India to join the ILRS in 2035. (In fact, the Moon could become one of the few domains in which India and China may have a practical incentive to cooperate on the Moon even while competing on the Earth, and India should endeavour to preserve rather than foreclose that possibility.) The government can say ‘yes’, but if China uses different communication protocols, data formats or operational procedures, India will face a tough choice: to build a second, expensive set of capabilities with China or to persuade China to change its systems to be interoperable with American designs.

Different ecosystems

That is, the U.S.-China competition means India’s increasing embedding in one technological ecosystem will also increase the cost of engaging with the other in future. At the same time, India will be mistaken to avoid deepening ISRO’s relationship with NASA. The U.S.-led ecosystem is much larger and more technologically diverse than the one led by China. But India may nonetheless have to reconsider its strategic autonomy in the spaceflight domain — particularly if the U.S.-China rivalry changes substantially over the next two or three decades. It should certainly steer clear of any dependencies that could hold back its own space programme because of U.S. objections.

In fact, one useful way to achieve this that also presents yet another opportunity for Indian leadership in space is to push for open international standards that allow nations to retain sovereign control over specific hardware and software components without hampering collaborations in space. Such diplomacy could foster interoperability between the lunar blocs and allow India to retain its strategic autonomy.

If it does not, the Moon may cease to be a foreign world but India may find itself a foreigner there.

Published – August 16, 2026 03:00 am IST

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the English novelist L.P. Hartley wrote famously in his 1953 novel The Go-Between. In a peculiar twist, the same cannot be said of the Moon. It is not a foreign country, or even a foreign world: the U.S.’s manoeuvring to beat China to the satellite has increasingly meant the Moon is an extension of the Earth’s geopolitics and political culture.

At the ninth India-U.S. Civil Space Joint Working Group meeting at Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) headquarters last week, NASA invited the organisation to participate in its ‘Moon Base’ programme, ostensibly as part of the two countries’ Artemis Accords partnership. According to NASA, the facility will be built piece by piece near the Moon’s south pole, where sunlight is available for longer durations and where permanently shadowed craters hold significant water-ice deposits. The target is for it to be humankind’s first outpost on a new celestial body, taking shape around 2030.

NASA is leaning heavily on private industry for this, having already awarded contracts to Astrolab (worth $219 million) and Lunar Outpost ($220 million) for lunar terrain vehicles, Blue Origin ($188 million) for delivery task orders, and Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines ($600 million) for four robotic missions to the Moon to deliver equipment. Intuitive is also developing a relay satellite under a separate contract.

Further, as part of NASA chief Jared Isaacman’s overhaul of the Artemis programme earlier this year, in no small part responding to the Trump administration’s December 2025 space policy calling for securing U.S. interests in cislunar space, the profiles of the Artemis III and IV Missions changed. Now, Mission III will be a crewed test flight in Earth orbit in 2027 and Mission IV will attempt the first lunar landing under the programme in 2028. Taken together, the ‘Moon Base’ is effectively the next phase of the new Artemis programme, tasked with keeping — intermittently at first, and eventually continuously — Artemis astronauts on the Moon.

Deepening partnership

Since India signed the Artemis Accords in 2023, NASA and ISRO have engaged regularly across several areas. NASA has trained India’s astronaut candidates for the ‘Gaganyaan’ human spaceflight mission. In 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Donald Trump jointly announced a broader strategic technologies framework, including spaceflight.

ISRO also launched the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, a major scientific mission that has been a decade in the making. NASA instruments are slated to fly on forthcoming Chandrayaan missions just as they did on the first three.

While it seems almost facile to suggest the U.S. also engage with China considering the latter’s formidable spaceflight capabilities — many industry experts agree the age of U.S. dominance in spaceflight is in its twilight years — the two countries’ actions mean that the lines they have drawn on the Earth are set to be extended to the Moon, and that will pose new challenges for India.

In 2021, China and Russia announced plans to cooperate on an ‘International Lunar Research Station’ (ILRS), which China described as a long-term lunar science and technology facility, also to be built near the south pole and with a targeted deadline of 2035. Like the Artemis Accords, the ILRS is an international effort, currently involving 17 countries and organisations and more than 50 research institutions worldwide.

Earlier this year, when NASA solicited proposals for payloads to send to the Moon, it said it welcomed foreign entities “except those with bilateral ties to China”. NASA’s FY2027 budget request has also described the ‘Moon Base’ as a means to establish U.S. “superiority on the Moon” and to preserve U.S. leadership in space — language with more strategic overtones relative to the agency’s pre-Trump rhetoric.

Given how much of U.S. policy is shaped by out-competing China, India’s gains or losses will not be restricted to its space programme either. For instance, ISRO’s engagement with NASA has arguably become more politicised thanks to NASA’s own politicisation by virtue of having to respond to China’s ILRS plans. Contrary to the focus areas of these bodies through much of their histories, future discussions would be poorly served by treating their engagement on the Moon as purely exploratory.

For example, the Artemis Accords do not say a signatory cannot cooperate with non-signatory countries. (In June, ISRO also hosted the BRICS Heads of Space Agencies meeting in Bengaluru with China among the participants). However, the Artemis programme itself is increasingly concerned with infrastructure, and building one’s components, equipment, tools, etc. to be interoperable with that infrastructure will thus extend geopolitical alignments on the Earth to the Moon.

Suppose China invites India to join the ILRS in 2035. (In fact, the Moon could become one of the few domains in which India and China may have a practical incentive to cooperate on the Moon even while competing on the Earth, and India should endeavour to preserve rather than foreclose that possibility.) The government can say ‘yes’, but if China uses different communication protocols, data formats or operational procedures, India will face a tough choice: to build a second, expensive set of capabilities with China or to persuade China to change its systems to be interoperable with American designs.

Different ecosystems

That is, the U.S.-China competition means India’s increasing embedding in one technological ecosystem will also increase the cost of engaging with the other in future. At the same time, India will be mistaken to avoid deepening ISRO’s relationship with NASA. The U.S.-led ecosystem is much larger and more technologically diverse than the one led by China. But India may nonetheless have to reconsider its strategic autonomy in the spaceflight domain — particularly if the U.S.-China rivalry changes substantially over the next two or three decades. It should certainly steer clear of any dependencies that could hold back its own space programme because of U.S. objections.

In fact, one useful way to achieve this that also presents yet another opportunity for Indian leadership in space is to push for open international standards that allow nations to retain sovereign control over specific hardware and software components without hampering collaborations in space. Such diplomacy could foster interoperability between the lunar blocs and allow India to retain its strategic autonomy.

If it does not, the Moon may cease to be a foreign world but India may find itself a foreigner there.

Published – August 16, 2026 03:00 am IST

ISRO says that this event highlights the strength of the long-term cooperation in place since 1978 and subsequent renewal in 2002 between two globally significant space research organisations.
| Photo Credit: FILE PHOTO

ISRO says that this event highlights the strength of the long-term cooperation in place since 1978 and subsequent renewal in 2002 between two globally significant space research organisations.
| Photo Credit: FILE PHOTO

New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a candid chat with Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath, making his podcast debut on the entrepreneur’s People by WTF series. During the podcast, he spoke about his unexpected journey in politics and how he deals with failures among other things.

“I am not someone who will spend his life crying over a setback… One has to take risks at every moment,” PM Modi said.

Citing the example of Chandrayaan-2, which failed at the last hurdle in 2019, the Prime Minister said that many people didn’t want him to go to the launch event.

“They said, ‘Sir, it is uncertain. Every country in the world has failed. They succeed only after the fourth or sixth attempt. What if something untoward happens?’ I said, ‘So what? Now, don’t I have any responsibility towards it? So I went,” he said.

“(Chandrayaan-2) crashed at the last moment. Everyone present there was worried. No one had the courage to inform the Prime Minister about it,” he added.

PM Modi recalled that he couldn’t sleep that night and decided to meet the team that worked on the mission before he left because “it was a big setback for the country”.

“I am not someone who will spend his life crying over a setback. I went in the morning and told all the scientists, ‘If there is a failure, then it is my responsibility’,” he said, adding he did everything to instil as much “confidence as I could in them. And Chandrayaan-3 was successful”.

Watch:

The mission control lost contact with the Chandrayaan-2 lunar module moments before its slated landing. Back at the ISRO headquarters in Bengaluru, K Sivan broke down. The Prime Minister, who had flown down to the southern city to watch the landing event, hugged and consoled Mr Sivan.

Chandrayaan-3 successfully landed on the moon on August 23, 2023, in a mission seen as crucial to lunar exploration and India’s standing as a space power.

The Prime Minister, during the podcast, also spoke about the lessons from the Chandrayaan-2 failure that he uses in politics.

“You see, taking risks in politics requires a lot of preparation. One has to take risks at every moment,” he said.

In the two-hour podcast, PM Modi also shared about his childhood, education, his journey in politics and how he handles anxiety.

New Delhi:

The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved a new moon mission “Chandrayaan-4” to develop and demonstrate technologies needed for landing of Indian astronauts on the moon and safely bring them back to Earth.

Chandrayaan-4 mission will achieve the foundational technologies for the landing of Indian astronauts on the moon (planned by year 2040) and return safely back to Earth, a statement said.

“Major technologies that are required for docking/undocking, landing, safe return to earth and also accomplish lunar sample collection and analysis would be demonstrated,” it said.

The total fund requirement for the technology demonstration mission “Chandrayaan-4” is Rs 2,104.06 crore, the statement said.

ISRO will be responsible for the development of spacecraft and launch. The mission is expected to be completed within 36 months of approval with the participation of industry and academia.

All the critical technologies are envisaged to be indigenously developed.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Syed Mustafa Kamal.
| Photo Credit: Photo Credit: X/@KamalMQM

Pakistani law-maker Syed Mustafa Kamal drew a comparison between India’s achievements and the precarious situation in Karachi, by mentioning India’s moon landing mission.

The Muttahida Quami Movement Pakistan (MQM-P) leader said that while India is landing on the moon, Karachi is making news of children being killed by falling in open gutters.

“Today, the condition in Karachi is that, while the world is going to the moon, children are dying by falling into gutter in Karachi. On the same screen, there is news that India landed on the moon, and just after two seconds, the news is that a child died in an open gutter in Karachi,” Mr. Kamal said in his address to the Parliament on May 15.

He further highlighted the lack of fresh water in Karachi. The MQM-P leader also said citing a report that there are 70 lakh children in Karachi and more than 2.6 crore children in Pakistan, who are not able to go to schools.

“Karachi is the revenue engine of Pakistan. The two seaports operational in Pakistan since its inception, are both in Karachi. We (Karachi) are the gateway to the entire Pakistan, Central Asia to Afghanistan…For 15 years, Karachi was not given even a bit of fresh water. Even the water that came, the tanker mafia hoarded it and sold it to the people of Karachi,” Kamal said.

“We have a total of 48,000 schools, but a new report says that out of that 11,000 are ‘ghost schools’. Seventy lakh children in Sindh don’t go to school and a total of 2,62,00,000 children in the country don’t go to school…if we just focus on this, the leaders of the country shouldn’t even get proper sleep,” the Pakistani Parliamentarian added.

In August last year, India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander became the first spacecraft from the country to safely reach the lunar surface in August 2023. India also became the first country in the world to land on the South Pole of the moon. Meanwhile, Pakistan, which is grappling with economic distress, high inflation, and mounting debt, is seeking a new loan programme from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under the Extended Fund Facility (EFF).

“A team of the global lender is currently in Pakistan to hold talks on the issue. It has urged Islamabad to bring “strong cost-side reforms” to restore the viability of the country’s energy sector,” reported ARY News. It has also urged an ‘overhaul’ of its tax system. Last month, Pakistan completed a short-term $3 billion programme, that helped stave off sovereign default, however, the government has highlighted the need for a fresh, longer-term programme, according to Dawn.

To create awareness among students about the success of Chandrayaan-3, NCERT prepared a special reading module for schoolchildren and the Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan released it on October 17, 2023 in New Delhi in the presence of ISRO chairman S. Somanath.
| Photo Credit: Twitter/@dpradhanbjp

Bhutan, China want deal on boundaries ‘soon’

Bhutan and China held their 25th round of boundary talks, that have been held up since the last round in 2016, even as Bhutan’s Foreign Minister Tandi Dorji met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing, with both sides saying they want a deal on demarcating the boundaries “soon”.

Day after quitting IAS, Odisha Chief Minister’s aide V.K. Pandian takes up key roles

Odisha politics, otherwise dubbed quiet and monotonous for 25 years of domination by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, is set for an exciting and raucous phase as the CM’s long-time private secretary V.K. Pandian was on Tuesday appointed as the Chairman of 5T (Transparency, Technology, Teamwork, Time and Transformation) Initiative and Nabin Odisha.

NCERT reading material on Chandrayaan draws ire for ‘mixing science with mythology’

Reading material suggested by National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) on Chandrayaan-3 for schoolchildren has drawn the ire of rationalists and educationists for “mixing science with mythology.” They also contend that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been glorified in the reading material instead of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the contribution of the scientists.

Throw out forces using casteism, regionalism to divide country: PM Modi

Returning to the venue he had graced during Dasara celebrations in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday called upon people to finish off forces trying to divide the country with casteism and regionalism.

Centre to roll out DNA, face matching systems at police stations across country

More than a year after the Criminal Procedure Identification Act (CrPI) was passed by Parliament, the Centre is all set to roll out ‘DNA and Face Matching’ systems at 1,300 police stations across the country. The provisions of the Act are yet to be implemented entirely on the ground. There are logistic and connectivity issues too, police officials said.

Israel calls for resignation of UNSG Antonio Guterres

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s comment to the Security Council that attacks by Hamas “did not happen in a vacuum” angered Israel, which called for the UN chief’s resignation and apology. In a post on X, Mr. Cohen said he “will not meet with the UN Secretary-General. After the October 7th massacre, there is no place for a balanced approach. Hamas must be erased off the face of the planet!”

Though they are not elected, judges have vital roles to play in evolution of societies: CJI Chandrachud

Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud has said that judges, though not elected, have a very vital role to play because the judiciary has a “stabilising influence” in the evolution of societies which are rapidly changing with technology. He was responding to the most common criticism that unelected judges should not venture into the executive’s domain.

Sena vs Sena Dussehra rally: Thackeray corners Shinde over Maratha reservation

The struggle for supremacy over the hearts and minds of the Shiv Sena cadre was played out in earnest during the rival Dussehra rallies of CM Eknath Shinde and former CM Uddhav Thackeray on Tuesday, with Mr. Shinde accusing Mr. Thackeray of forsaking his father, Bal Thackeray’s Hindutva and prostrating himself before the Congress.

U.S. States sue Meta for harming young people’s mental health, collecting data on children

A group of 33 States including California and New York are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people’s mental health and contributing the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.

Canoeist couple inspires each other to achieve rare feat of winning Asian Para Games medals

Manish Kaurav was not sure of winning a medal at the Hangzhou Asian Para Games on Tuesday but he remembers his wife and Indian para canoe team-mate Prachi Yadav telling him “we will not go empty-handed”. The couple achieved a rare distinction of husband-wife winning medals in the Asian Para Games in Hangzhou. Prachi won the gold medal in canoe KL2 event on Tuesday to add to her silver in the VL2 category on Monday. Manish picked a bronze in men’s canoe KL3 event on Tuesday.

Army gears up to induct first lot of Apache attack helicopters from February 2024 onwards 

The Army is gearing up to induct the first lot of AH-64E Apache attack helicopters from February 2024 onwards and will be deployed in the desert sector, while the bigger contract for 156 indigenous Light Combat Helicopters (LCH), 90 for the Army and 66 for the Indian Air Force, estimated to cost ₹45,000 crore, is expected to be taken up by the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) next week.

ICC World Cup | Mahmudullah’s century in vain as South Africa thrashes Bangladesh

It was another day, another run feast for South Africa! At the Wankhede Stadium on October 24, it rode on Quinton de Kock’s 174 and a blitzkrieg 90 from Heinrich Klassen to plunder 144 off the last ten overs, and put up a mammoth 382 for five, before handing a 149-run defeat to Bangladesh and bolster its chances of a last-four spot in the World Cup.

The story so far: Scripting history, the Chandrayaan-3 lander landed in the south polar region of the moon on August 23 at 6:03 pm IST, making India the first country to successfully soft-land in that area. The Vikram lander along with the Pragyan rover have since completed a small suite of surface tests. China’s Yutu-2 rover is the only other such instrument currently active on the moon.

Chandrayaan-3 is India’s second attempt to land on the moon. The first was Chandrayaan-2, whose lander module crashed on the moon in 2019.

China had landed a lander-rover module in the South Pole-Aitken Basin (this is not as close to the south polar region as Chandrayaan) in 2018. Both are operational as of date.

Here’s a look at China’s missions to the moon.

Chang’e

Since 2007, China has been launching lunar missions comprising orbiters, landers, rovers, and sample-return spacecraft. While Chang’e-1 and 2 launched lunar orbiters, Chang’e-3 launched the Yutu rover, which conducted a series of experiments on the lunar surface.

Planned initially as a back-up for Chang’e 3, the Chang’e 4 mission launched Yutu-2 on December 8, 2018, and it became the first rover to successfully soft-land on the moon’s far side.

After its launch, Chang’e 4 entered lunar orbit on December 12, 2018 and later completed three weeks of orbital manoeuvres before the spacecraft made a controlled landing in the Von Karman crater in the South Pole-Aitkin Basin on January 3, 2019.

The rover, on the far side of the moon, hibernates in the lunar night and functions during the day. The lander that transported it, Chang’e 4, is still operational and is a communication relay between the rover and control stations on the earth together with the orbiter, Queqiao. Details of data collected by the rover and the experiments conducted by it have not been made public by the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA).

Chang’e 5 was launched on November 23, 2020, with two lunar orbiters, a lander, and an ascent vehicle. The primary mission objective was to collect surface samples from the Mons Rumker region of Oceanus Procellarum on the moon. After the launch, Chang’e 5 completed a lunar orbit before the descender spacecraft separated on November 29, 2020. Lowering into a circular orbit, the descender along with the lander landed on Mons Rumker, a vast volcanic plain.

The lander was equipped with a robotic arm with a scoop, a coring drill, and a chamber with a regolith storing capacity of up to 4 kg. (Regolith is the layer of soil, composed of loose rocks, dust, and other debris that covers the moon’s surface).

The lander also had the Panoramic Camera (PCAM), Lunar Regolith Penetrating Radar (LRPR), and a visible and near-infrared Lunar Mineralogical Spectrometer (LMS). With a life of one lunar day (two weeks), the lander did most of the drilling and sampling within 48 hours of landing. From a depth of 1 metre, the lander collected and stored 1.731 kg of lunar regolith and later transferred it to the ascender module.

This module then travelled to the orbiter and transferred the sample container to the return capsule, which fired its rockets and entered the earth-moon orbit before landing in Inner Mongolia in northern China on December 17, 2020. Before returning to the earth, the orbiter separated from the return capsule, fired its rockets and headed for the earth-sun Lagrange point L1 to observe the sun. (This is the same location in space to which India’s Aditya L-1 satellite is currently headed.)

China has more moon missions planned — Chang’e 6,7 and 8 in 2024, 2026 and 2027— before finally sending a crewed mission to the moon by 2030. Continuing its sample return mission, Chang’e 6, a back up to Chang’e 5, will also have a lander with a scooping arm, return container, and ascender. This mission will also land on the far side of the moon, in the South Pole-Aitken Basin.

In 2026, Chang’e 7 is scheduled to expand on lunar south pole exploration by conducting detailed surveys, analysing the terrain, and studying the geological composition, locations of water ice, and the space environment. The mission will focus on detecting water ice in parts of the moon’s permanently shadowed craters.

In 2027, Chang’e 8 will test technologies necessary to construct a lunar science base in the south pole, carrying a lander, a rover, a flying detector, and a 3D-printing module.

Chang’e mission aims

The Chang’e lunar exploration missions have seen evolving phases of the Chinese space programme since they began in 2007. Initial missions Chang’e 1 and 2 were designed to launch an orbiter and capture high resolution photos of the lunar surface. Chang’e 3 launched in 2013 comprised of a rover (Yutu) which explored 3 sq. km of the moon for 90 earth days collecting data to understand the moon’s elemental composition and the lunar subsurface. This mission demonstrated China’s capability to soft land on the moon.

However, the programme’s aims changed with Chang’e 4, turning its focus towards the southern shadowed areas of the moon. Launching yet another lander-rover in 2018, Chang’e 4 was tasked with performing a controlled landing in the Von Karman crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin and capture humankind’s first photos of the far side of the moon taken from the surface. Armed with spectrometers and radars, the rover studied the composition of the lunar surface there.

China then changed Chang’e mission’s aim to returning samples of lunar regolith to the earth with Chang’e 5, which brought 1.731 kg of lunar regolith back.

Chang’e 4’s lander and Yutu-2 rover were supposed to last for two months, but they are still functional, and have been sending data and high-resolution photos of the far side of the moon. Both the lander and rover use radioisotopic heat sources to maintain their temperatures through lunar nights.

Chang’e 5 had a specific lifetime of 23 days from launch on November 23, 2020, to return on December 16, 2020. After lunar orbit capture on November 28, the lander and descender/ascent vehicle separated and landed on the lunar surface on December 1. As the lander was capable of collecting samples for only 1 lunar day ), it lifted off via the ascender on December 3 and transferred the samples to the return capsule, before crashing to the moon’s surface on December 7.

The return capsule landed with parachutes on December 16 in northern China. Before entering earth orbit, the orbiter headed to the earth-sun L1 Lagrange point for a mission to study the sun.

As of 2021, the orbiter observed the earth and the sun, and was on its way to the moon. Some reports suggest that the Chang’e 5 orbiter may have performed a lunar flyby before heading to asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa— a part of China’s asteroid sample-return mission scheduled for 2025.

Midhani Chairman and Managing Director S.K. Jha inspecting company products, on September 8, 2023..
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Mishra Dhatu Nigam Limited (Midhani), the defence public sector unit specialising in making special steels and alloys for the strategic sector, is ready for the Gaganyaan Mission after playing a successful role in the Chandrayaan Mission in supplying vital materials for making the launch vehicle, engine, motors, lander and the rover on the Moon.

It has already transferred the entire Gaganyaan project sets of materials for making rockets, engines, crew modules and others sufficient for “five launches”, though the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is planning three with the last one likely to take the humans into space, disclosed chairman and managing director S.K. Jha.

In an exclusive interaction, the top official said all the special metals and alloys that goes into the making of various systems have been delivered as the space agency will be making many trials before sending the rockets into the space under the Gaganyaan human spaceflight programme.

“For Gaganyaan Mission, we have to be very careful as it calls for highest standard of purity of raw materials, during processing and after processing, we have witnesses stringent quality controls. To achieve that kind of performance we have to take precautions from the beginning. It is a big challenge. In every stage, ISRO has sought 20% extra,” said Dr. Jha.

With common production facilities for many projects, the challenge was in separating the work from others in the production. “Our engineers, quality control and process engineers have been specially counselled about being alert all the time and ISRO chairman S. Somanath himself had come down for a session to talk about following the protocols”, he said.

Midhani had “done lot of technological advancements” for taking up tasks in a mission mode and with less turnaround time. “We test for fractures in our lab and stress tests are done at very high and low temperatures to demonstrate the properties. We check our material minutely at every step as we cannot cannot afford to fail up in space. ISRO will also do its parallel tests at its facility,” he explained.

The CMD was especially excited about Chandrayaan’s success. “GSLV-LVM rocket is a very high powered one with ISRO. The liquid engine firing from the bottom has lot of components going from us – nickel, titanium alloys. We had supplied these earlier too, but this latest one has gone for the farthest distance. What more testimony is needed about our work quality?,” he chuckles.

Titanium alloys were used in both the lander and the rover on the moon and the material is expected to withstand the harsh weather of very high temperatures and extreme cold. Indigenously developed ultra high strength ‘maraging’ steel – alloy of iron, nickel, cobalt, molybdenum, titanium and aluminium was also used.

“Design and specifications are given by ISRO and their scientists are present throughout to do a double check ,” he reveals. Once an order is issued, Midhani is now capable of making materials enough for 10 launches a year from one launch for two months. “In fact, every three months we can give material for three to four launches including all sets – rings, plates, wires, etc. ISRO inventory position is good now,” added Dr. Jha.