India’s accomplishments in space are getting more impressive

A view of India's Vikram lander taken Wednesday from the Pragyan rover.

It's been more than a week since India's Chandrayaan 3 mission landed on the Moon, and it's a good time to assess where the world's most populous nation stands relative to other global other space powers.

The successful arrival of the Chandrayaan 3 mission's Vikram lander on the Moon made India the first country besides China to achieve a soft landing on the lunar surface since 1976, following a series of failed landings by private organizations and India itself four years ago. And it made India just the fourth nation overall to achieve this feat.

Since the landing of Chandrayaan 3on August 23, India has released some early findings from the lander and its mobile rover, named Pragyan, along with photos of the vehicles exploring the Moon's alien charcoal-colour landscape.

The Moon landing is just the latest in a string of successes in space for India, which has a thriving rocket program with a family of four launch vehicles, its own regional satellite navigation network, and nearly 10 years ago, sent an orbiter to Mars. If India can notch another success in its space program in the next few years, the country could become the fourth nation capable of sending its astronauts into low-Earth orbit.

India is still well behind the space programs of the United States and China, but one could argue India has moved closer to Europe and Russia, and could be on par with Japan when you take into account several factors: access to space, space exploration, military space projects, and applications like communications, navigation, and remote sensing from orbit.

Among the space powers considered here, India has the lowest human development index, a measure of social factors such as quality of life, income, and education. But its space program is a point of national pride, and Narendra Modi, India's nationalist prime minister, has made a point to associate himself with Indian successes in space.

Those successes have come on a shoestring budget. The Indian government this year is allocating $1.52 billion to space efforts, and India developed and launched Chandrayaan 3 for less than $100 million, lower than the cost of many blockbuster Hollywood films.

“I’ve described India as a sleeping giant and one that is quickly awakening," said Mike Gold, an attorney and space industry official who previously led NASA's space policy office. "India is absolutely vital to global space development ... since the country is active with lunar programs, Martian programs, and now even human spaceflight.”

Since the landing of Chandrayaan 3, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)—India's space agency—has released a handful of images, including a black-and-white shot of the stationary SUV-size Vikram lander taken by the Pragyan rover. There's also a video, shown below, of the Pragyan rover rolling down the ramp from the Vikram lander in the hours after arriving on the Moon on August 23.

So far, ISRO hasn't been releasing all of the pictures taken by the rover and lander on the Moon, and the Indian space agency hasn't posted many images on its website, preferring to share them on social media. Let's hope Indian officials develop a better way of releasing high-resolution imagery from Chandrayaan 3 and future deep space probes.

But it's always exciting to see a place human eyes have never seen before, and India's triumph with Chandrayaan 3 is worth celebrating.

In a visit with Indian space scientists in Bangalore last week, Modi announced the Chandrayaan 3 landing site would be named Shiv Shakti Point, a reference to Shiva, a principal deity in Hinduism, and Shakti, which honors the role of women scientists on the mission.

The Vikram lander and Pragyan rover settled onto a landing site closer to the Moon's south pole than any previous lunar lander. Early science results from the mission include the detection of a seismic "event" on the Moon, and the first measurements of the plasma environment near the lunar surface close to the south pole.

"These quantitative measurements potentially assist in mitigating the noise that lunar plasma introduces into radio wave communication. Also, they could contribute to the enhanced designs for upcoming lunar visitors," ISRO said.

Instruments on the rover have detected sulfur in the lunar crust at the landing site. "This finding ... compels scientists to develop fresh explanations for the source of sulfur in the area," ISRO said, adding that the element could be intrinsic to the landing site, or may have been produced by an ancient volcanic eruption or an asteroid or cometary impact.

The Times of India reported this week that Indian engineers are increasingly optimistic that the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover could wake up and continue their mission after the upcoming two-week-long lunar night. When the Sun sets at the landing site next week, the two vehicles will hibernate as temperatures plummet to minus 333° Fahrenheit (minus 203° Celsius).

The original design life of the lander and rover was to operate for one lunar day, or 14 Earth days, but assuming electronics and batteries hold up to the frigid conditions, there's a chance the vehicles will automatically wake up when rays of sunlight again fall on their solar panels in mid-September.

Taking India seriously

The landing follows several decades of serious growth in India's accomplishments in space. India launched a small satellite into low-Earth orbit with an indigenous rocket for the first time in 1980, then debuted the workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle in 1993.

India's orbital-class rockets only flew about one time per year until the early 2000s. Since then, India has ramped up its launch rate, reaching seven orbital flights on a couple of occasions, an annual record that India is poised to shatter this year. The country has launched its rockets six times so far in 2023, with a seventh launch scheduled for Saturday.

Those recent launch statistics fall far behind the United States, China, and Russia. In terms of mass launched into orbit, ISRO ranked fourth among global launch providers in the first half of this year, after SpaceX, China's state-run launch enterprises, and Russia's space agency, according to data released by BryceTech.

India's expendable rockets have notched 54 successful launches in 57 tries since 2011—a success rate of nearly 95 percent, about the same as all European and Japanese rockets and slightly better than Russian launch vehicles in the same period. India's 95 percent success rate falls short of the reliability of US launch companies SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, and also lags behind China's Long March rocket family.

India's launch vehicles are regularly used to deploy the country's satellites and payloads from international and commercial customers. When OneWeb could no longer launch its Internet satellites on Russian rockets after the invasion of Ukraine, the company selected SpaceX and India's heaviest rocket, the LVM3, to finish launching the broadband network.

ISRO recently started an initiative to commercialize its rockets by turning over responsibility for manufacturing and launch operations to the private sector.

Launch is just one way of assessing the standing of India's space program on the global stage. India has dispatched robotic missions to orbit Mars, orbit the Moon, and now land on the Moon, vaulting ISRO into an exclusive club of space agencies. These achievements in planetary science are comparable to those of the European Space Agency and JAXA, Japan's space agency. Although those space agencies haven't landed on the Moon—and Japan hasn't had a successful mission to Mars—ESA and JAXA have had more success in sending probes to comets and asteroids.

In this area, India is indisputably ahead of Russia in terms of recent accomplishments. Russia hasn't had a successful mission to another celestial body since the Soviet era in the 1980s.

India and Japan are working together on a future robotic lunar landing mission that could launch in the late 2020s, and India in June signed on to the Artemis Accords, a non-binding set of principles among like-minded nations guiding a vision for peaceful and transparent exploration of space. The Artemis Accords were developed by the United States, and the signing raised questions about future Indian partnership with NASA's Artemis lunar program, although US and Indian officials haven't laid out any details of potential cooperation.

“The fact that they are a nation that intends in the future to fly their own astronauts, is that significant? The answer is yes,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a conversation with Ars in June. “I think it’s of significance that a major country that’s not considered aligned with the US (is) a signatory.”

Tracks from the Pragyan rover on the surface of the Moon.

Another milestone mission for India's space program is scheduled for launch on Saturday, when a PSLV rocket is set for liftoff with a solar observatory named Aditya-L1. This spacecraft will travel to an orbit around the L1 Lagrange point nearly a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) on the Sunward side of the Earth, where Aditya-L1 will use a solar telescope and coronagraph to observe the Sun and a suite of sensors to measure the solar wind.

Next year, an Indian rocket will send a sophisticated radar satellite into orbit in partnership with NASA to measure minute changes on Earth's surface.

Then there is the proliferation of Indian satellites circling Earth, ranging from television broadcast satellites to sharp-eyed reconnaissance spacecraft feeding data to India's military. India also has a network of satellites providing navigation services over South Asia, a similar regional capability to one that Japan has deployed over the last decade. The United States, China, and Russia each have their own satellite networks for global navigation services.

Where is India lagging?

Barring any significant delays, India is a few years away from truly entering the uppermost echelons of the world's space powers. The $1.1 billion Gaganyaan program (Gaganyaan means "celestial vehicle" in Sanskrit) has been a priority of Prime Minister Modi, who announced in 2018 that the new Indian-made space capsule would carry an Indian astronaut into orbit by 2022.

That timetable has come and gone, and the first crewed flight of the Gaganyaan spacecraft is now projected to occur no earlier than 2025. But some big milestones are on the horizon, with a high-altitude test of the Gagayaan launch abort system planned as soon as late September or early October. An on-pad test of the abort system occurred in 2018.

An orbital test flight of the Gaganyaan spacecraft without any crew members aboard could launch in 2024, setting the stage for the astronaut flight in 2025.

As a prelude to the Gaganyaan program, NASA and ISRO have agreed to train Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and an Indian crew member will fly to the International Space Station next year on a short-duration mission. Four Indian astronauts slated for the Gaganyaan program completed more than a year of training at Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow in 2021, according to Indian media.

India is human-rating its LVM3 rocket, with two powerful solid rocket boosters and a liquid-fueled core stage, to haul the Gaganyaan spacecraft into orbit. The capsule is designed to accommodate a crew of three astronauts for missions lasting up to one week.

If India successfully establishes a sustainable human spaceflight program, then it may be time to re-evaluate India's ranking relative to Russia among space-faring nations. Despite Russia's languishing record in deep space exploration, its prowess in human spaceflight continues to make Russia's space program a global leader.

Russia's venerable Soyuz spacecraft used for crew missions still relies on a design originating more than 50 years ago, but the Soyuz has flown more missions than any other human-rated spacecraft. Russia has committed to ferrying crews to and from the International Space Station through at least 2028, but there are fundamental questions about what comes next for Russia's human spaceflight program.

Russia's space agency has unveiled a concept for a national space station to take over from the ISS, but new Russian space projects that aren't rooted in the designs of the Soviet era have had little success.

India also has some catching up to do in its military space program to match the capabilities of the United States, China, Russia, and the collective capacity of European nations. Likewise, India's expertise in rocket propulsion falls behind other countries.

For the most part, India's rockets are powered by solid-fueled motors and liquid-fueled engines using hypergolic propellants. These engines consume toxic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, a propellant mix that the United States and Russia are moving away from with their large rockets.

Hypergolic propellants are easier to handle than cryogenic fuels, and they come with a benefit in their simplicity. Hypergolic fluids combust when they come into contact with one another, meaning the only thing that needs to happen for an engine to ignite is the opening of propellant valves.

India uses the liquid-fueled Vikas engine on its three largest rockets, including the new LVM3 that will launch the Gaganyaan crew spacecraft. The Vikas engine is based on the French Viking engine, which was developed in the 1970s for the European Ariane rocket. India has a cryogenic hydrogen-fueled upper-stage engine that flies on the LVM3, but there aren't any other engine development projects far enough long to be ready for flight in the next few years.

Russia, on the other hand, still boasts an impressive pedigree in rocket propulsion, good enough to find customers in the international market, including in the United States. Its kerosene-fueled staged combustion engines have a perfect record flying on ULA's Atlas V and Northrop Grumman's Antares rockets.

China's newest generation of Long March rockets are powered by engines that consume cryogenic propellants and will eventually replace the older line of Long March rockets using hypergolic propellants.

Of course, the United States is a world leader in rocket propulsion, with a wide array of high-thrust engines that burn kerosene, hydrogen, and methane.