August 24, 2023 at 1:41 p.m. EDT
An aircraft prepares to land as children cheering for the successful landing of India’s moon craft Chandrayaan-3, on the moon surface, wave Indian flags at a school near the airport in Mumbai on Tuesday. (Rajanish Kakade/AP)Comment on this storyComment
NEW DELHI — As its lander approached the moon’s surface on Wednesday and its moment of history drew near, the Indian Space Research Organization switched its online telecast to split-screen mode.
One half of the screen showed ISRO engineers and officials waiting anxiously in the mission control room. The other half showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was watching over link.
Minutes after 6 p.m. India time, the Chandrayaan-3 module touched down, and both halves of the screen burst into celebration.
For India, the landing on the moon’s south pole heralded its arrival as a modern scientific power that is outshining some traditional space-faring nations, such as Russia. For Modi, a staunch nationalist who often yokes his image to grand symbols of India’s growing stature, the landing represented a personal triumph.
Whatever India’s domestic challenges — a gaping lack of jobs, fitful progress in expanding manufacturing and infrastructure, rising authoritarianism and internal strife — that split-screen moment underscored how the world’s most populous nation, and Modi, are increasingly enjoying the limelight on the world’s center stage.
“This moment is the announcement of an advanced India,” Modi said in an address that began immediately after ISRO officials declared the landing complete. The feat, Modi said, reflected his nation’s “Amrit Kaal,” a term from Vedic astrology meaning “auspicious period” that he often uses to describe India’s resurgence under his tenure.
As the spacecraft approached the moon, India seemed to be briefly unified by a national obsession rivaling cricket.
Newspapers carried photos of Hindus performing fire rituals and Muslims praying for a smooth landing. In northern Uttar Pradesh state, the conservative chief minister Yogi Adityanath ordered all schools to broadcast the ISRO live, while a hip restaurant chain in southern Bangalore hosted watch parties.
To be sure, Indian and foreign space industry experts say the landing has many practical benefits for Indian science and its space program.
India lands a spacecraft softly on the moon’s surface
By being the first country to deploy a rover on the south pole, India could bring back new data about pools of water that NASA scientists believe are frozen in craters and could one day be used to sustain a crewed lunar base. Indian scientists say ISRO will gain precious experience from the landing — its previous attempt in 2019 failed in a crash — and also earn a say in future space-related international discussions.
“India’s space power is related to soft power,” said Ajey Lele, a space expert at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, a think tank funded by the Defense Ministry. “There’s a lot of attraction to India right now. Americans, Japan … people are keen to collaborate.”
But the landing was also symbolically significant for India and its prime minister, one of the space program’s biggest cheerleaders.
Only four countries have landed on the moon. One of them, Russia, sought to make a return earlier this week, but the Luna-25 lander crashed on Monday. Earlier this year, a similar mission by a Japanese company failed.
Wednesday was a reminder that “India knows how to do more with less. The Russians and Japanese showed this is not easy,” said Mike Gold, a former NASA associate administrator who worked with India this year to sign the Artemis Accords, a set of principles guiding conduct in space.
Gold described India as an increasingly key player in the international space industry in recent years, particularly after the Modi government changed rules in 2020 to allow private start-ups to enter the sector and proe them with subsidies for new facilities. Indian officials promised this summer they are in the final stages of formulating a policy that would open India’s private space sector to foreign direct investment. ISRO’s director has spelled out ambitions for India to claim about 8 percent of the global space industry, up from 2 percent today.
“The second golden age of space, driven by private players — we’re seeing that occur in India like we did a decade or two ago in the U.S.,” said Gold, who is now an executive at Redwire Space, a private company in Jacksonville, Fla.
While Modi has placed himself in a central role in international politics — he has been courted by both the United States and Russia over the Ukraine war and has presented himself as a potential peacemaker — India’s space industry is also seeing interest from many countries, partly due to economics, and partly due to politics.
For decades, ISRO has quietly been one of the most cost-effective proers of rocket launches. Between 2018 and 2022, ISRO launched 177 satellites for other countries, the science minister said in Parliament in November. In March, ISRO rockets lofted 36 satellites for the satellite internet proer OneWeb after sanctions resulting from the Ukraine war meant the London-based company could no longer use Russian Soyuz rockets to ferry its cargo.
India, which has sent astronauts for training in Russia ahead of its first human spaceflight mission in the coming two years, also signed a deal in January with the Biden administration to train astronauts in Houston.
And much of this progress has been pushed by Modi himself, who in a 2018 Independence Day speech pledged to send an Indian astronaut to space. Modi drew ridicule from critics who noted that he has had mixed results fulfilling more basic promises such as building toilets in every village household or improving women’s health. But since then, the Indian leader has doubled down and announced new plans to explore the deep sea with submersibles that can descend 6,000 meters.
“Space and space exploration has always evoked a lot of interest in Prime Minister Modi personally,” said Ashok Malik, a former government adviser who is now a partner at the Asia Group consultancy. Malik recalled Modi, 72, often professing his admiration for Neil Armstrong landing on the moon — a moment that many Indians of his generation recall vily.
“He has often spoken about July 20, 1969, and what that day really meant for him,” Malik said.
When faced with criticism that India wasted money in space, Modi has previously countered that India specialized in “frugal engineering” and a lunar mission cost less than the $100 million Hollywood spent to make the 2013 space film “Gravity.” ISRO officials said the cost of the entire Chandrayaan-3 mission was about $77 million.
Siri Hulikal, a fiction writer in Bangalore, said she took her 8-year-old son, Achintya, to the local Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium to watch the landing even though he had a crucial Hindi exam the following morning.
“I said, ‘Chuck it, the Chandrayaan-3 isn’t going to happen again,’” Hulikal said.
When she arrived 45 minutes before the scheduled touchdown, the viewing area outside the planetarium was already packed. Kids had their faces painted with the Indian flag. Seniors sat in the audience to hear a retired ISRO scientist explain in layman’s terms what exactly the landing entailed.
Just before 6 p.m., Hulikal said, the noise in the crowd began to build. The retired ISRO scientist’s presentation was completely drowned out as the lander touched down. Achintya jumped into the air and hugged his mother.
“It was electric,” Hulikal said. “All you could hear was ‘Jai Hind’” — Long live India.
