NEWS

On the successful launch of Chandrayaan-1 on October 22, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh hailed India’s space mission to the Moon as a significant step forward in the country’s space programme, describing it as a historic milestone. He congratulated all the scientists associated with this mission for the successful completion of the launch. Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman Dr G. Madhavan Nair said all the launch vehicle systems performed satisfactorily and the spacecraft has been successfully placed in an orbit around the Earth. According to scientists at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, it was a normal liftoff. A statement issued by the space department on October 31 said, The health of the spacecraft is good and all the operations so far have been implemented as planned.

VIEWS

Chastisement by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India for procedural lapses in financial management notwithstanding, ISRO has done the nation proud by successfully launching Chandrayaan–1. However, it is necessary to evaluate this achievement against the catalogue of milestones and failures of the other players in the exclusive club of space faring nations.

India’s maiden mission to the Moon comes four and a half decades after the launch of the first sounding rocket from Thumba and nearly three decades after the first indigenously built Satellite Launch Vehicle successfully placed an experimental payload in orbit around the Earth. The Soviet Union, which was the first to launch a mission to the Moon, did so only two years after it placed its first satellite, the Sputnik, in Earth’s orbit in 1957. Even though NASA was lagging behind initially, it sent a fly-by mission to the Moon in 1959, two months after USSR. However, NASA landed a man on the Moon within a decade, a feat that for some reason the USSR never attempted. Initial attempts at Moon missions were plagued by failure. Between 1959 and 1965, the US and USSR together recorded eight such cases. On January 26, 1962, NASA’s Ranger 3 missed the Moon by 36,793 km. Subsequently, on June 8, 1965, the Soviet Luna 6 mission experienced a similar failure, missing the Moon by as much as 1,60,000 km.