This month we talk about Roscosmos, Luna-25, and Chandrayaan-3.
We also discuss water ice, the lunar southern polar region, and geopolitical influence.
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Transcript
On August 20, 2023, a Russian space mission called Luna-25, which was aiming for a soft-landing in the southern polar region of the Moon, crashed instead of landing, resulting in a memorable statement from the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which, announcing the failed landing, said: "The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon."
This represented a major embarrassment for Roscosmos, but also the Russian government more broadly, as it was the country's first Moon mission since the Luna-24 mission in 1976, and a lot was riding on it.
That importance stems from the fact that the agency has had a lot of trouble in the decades since that 70s-era mission, and though until recently it had a pretty nice setup as the default rocket-launch option for Earth orbit, following the retirement of the US's space shuttle program, the introduction of SpaceX and its reusable rocket components has completely shifted the launch industry in fundamental ways, making Russia's offerings a lot less compelling and sustainable, and thus more or less killing that golden goose they'd benefited and profited mightily from for all these years.
This launch, too, notably occurred during Russia's invasion of neighboring Ukraine, an invasion that was originally anticipated to only take a few days, the Ukrainian government taken out, puppet leadership put in their place, Ukraine brought back into Russia's orbit as a supplicant state, a bit like Belarus—mostly just there to serve as a barrier between Russian territory and that of their enemies.
That invasion, instead, has been drawn out to about a year-and-a-half, severely damaging Russia's global reputation, influence, income, and other elements of its previous standing, geopolitically.
This launch was meant to show the world that the Russian government could wage a full-scale invasion while also making historic moves on the moon, landing in a region that had never before been explored, and which is expected to be vital to further space exploration, as it is believed to contain the moon's largest deposits of accessible water ice, which'll be vital for long-term moon habitation, but also, potentially, for setting the moon up as a sort of space exploration filling station, allowing occupants to break said water into its component parts, which can then be used as rocket fuel.
Instead, the Luna-25 mission ended in failure—as most moon missions fronted by any nation throughout history have, to be fair—but this failure came with additional humiliation potential, as not only did a Russian effort fail at a moment in which the government was hoping to show that they've still got it, but another mission, which took a very different approach to the problem, and which was orchestrated by relative amateurs in this space, operating with a low budget, managed to succeed where the former spacefaring superpower could not.
What I'd like to talk about today is India's Chandrayaan-3 mission, and what it suggests about the future of space exploration.
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The Chandrayaan-3 is the third moon mission launched by the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, and the second successful one.
The Chandrayaan-1 was a lunar probe program that launched in 2008 and operated through mid-2009, and it was relatively simple as these things go, consisting of an orbital probe and an impacter, the first of which orbited the moon for the better part of a year, and the latter of which was shot at the lunar surface, which helped those running the program confirm the presence of widespread water molecules in lunar soil, or regolith.
That program did most of what they'd hoped it would do, though it conked out after less than a year, rather than the originally planned-for two year timeline, the probe failing due to issues with its thermal shielding and the star tracking sensor it used to maintain proper orientation.
This effort, though, put India in the small category of nations that had gotten spacecraft to the moon, which at that point only consisted of, in order of arrival, the Soviet Union, the US, Japan, and the EU member states behind the European Space Agency.
What's more, the price tag on the entire project was only about $88.73 million, which is quite low: for comparison, the failed Russian Luna-25 mission cost something like $200 million—more than twice as much.
The Chandrayaan-2 mission that followed that first, mostly successful lunar mission, consisted of an orbiter and a rover, and launched in July of 2019. It arrived in lunar orbit in August, but the lander component of the craft crashed when it tried to touch down in September; the crash was apparently caused by a software glitch.
The most recent mission, the Chandrayaan-3, is similar in many ways to its precursor, and it launched in July of 2023, arrived in lunar orbit at the beginning of August, and later the same month put a lander in the South Pole region of the moon—making India the first country to successfully do so, and only the fourth country to soft-land anywhere on the moon, after the Soviets, the US, and the Chinese.
The rover the ISRO managed to land in this southern portion of the moon has six wheels, weighs about 57 pounds, or 26 kg, and is only about 3 by 2.5 by 1.3 feet large, which is about 900 by 750 by 400 millimeters; so it's not huge, but it's loaded with tools meant to help it take stock of the nature of the lunar surface in this previously unexplored, at ground level, region.
The lander is a bit bigger, as it housed the rover during its landing, and it also contains an assortment of instruments meant to help researchers figure out all sorts of things about the lunar surface, including its seismicity, plasma density, thermal conductivity, and regolith composition.
This mission only cost about $75 million—lower than the previous mission's $117 million-ish price tag, and less than half of the competing Russian Luna-25 budget.
That relatively low cost is turning a lot of heads within the space industry, as although the ISRO has been very vocal about the help they've received from other space programs, tapping into their communications infrastructure, for instance, and the fact that they've been able to make use of earlier findings to develop things at lower costs than would have been possible when those findings were still being researched and initially funded, this suggests that some of these missions, which typically receive incredibly hefty, several-hundred-million-dollar price tags when funded by wealthier nations, might be possible at lower budgets, especially if they're focused on specific findings and make use of what's become largely off-the-shelf hardware and software.
NASA has been aiming for a similar price-range in their recent moon-related efforts, distributing funds from a budget of around $25.4 billion in total, but in quantities of around $70 million, to private space firms pitching their services as means of achieving these sorts of mission goals at a discount.
We've yet to see whether these companies, which have been absolutely killing it in near-earth orbit, of late, can repeat that minor miracle further field, in actual outer space, but in the meantime India is providing the world's space agencies with a blueprint for iterative successes, built atop relatively inexpensive partial failures.
At the moment, this is being seen as a major feather in India's geopolitical cap, as they're surging in terms of population and economy, replacing China as the world's most populous nation recently, and economically growing about 7% in 2022, and around 6.1% in the first quarter of 2023—beating forecasts.
The Indian government is expanding its relationships globally, strengthening its ties with the West, but also remaining open to making deals with traditionally outcast nations, when warranted; a powerful position to be in, compared to more deeply diplomatically enmeshed nations that dare not stray too far from their relationships with the US and European nations on one hand, or China and Russia and their allies, on the other.
India is locked into a regional conflict with their neighbor to the North, China, which has been showering itself with glory in recent decades, but which has recently slowed, economically, and has been doing a lot of saber-rattling in the South China Sea, sparking stronger ties between regional rivals, creating a sort of Pacific NATO situation that, alongside India, has made it trickier for China to expand its interests further.
India's leader, Narendra Modi, has been taking flack for his purported support of Hindu nationalists and their at-times violent oppression of India Muslims, and this is a dynamic that's unlikely to go away any time soon, possibly growing even bigger and more prominent as his party locks themselves into power, using methods that have been described by outside human rights groups as authoritarian.
The nation has become so fundamental to countering China's adventurism, though, and they've made themselves so vital to the global economy, interweaving their efforts with those of essentially everyone else, regardless of their traditional alliances, that it's difficult to see Modi and his party facing too much serious opposition from overseas leaders, as his approach to diplomacy has served more or less everyone, beyond India's borders, except China, Pakistan, and a few other traditional, regional opponents.
So it's a heady moment for the Indian government, as it seems primed, in the minds of some analysts at least, to pick up the growth baton China is on the precipice of dropping, becoming, perhaps, the engine that keeps global growth stoked, while at the same time accumulating superpower-related accolades of the sort nations don't typically acquire until later in their economic development—suggesting that India may be setting itself up for a speed run of the path China has blazed on its way out of extreme poverty and economic precariousness, though possibly enjoying that speed run from a position of relatively tight relationships with other global powers, rather than from the stance of opposition and ideological exclusion that China struck during its rise.
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Show Notes
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russias-moon-mission-falters-after-problem-entering-pre-landing-orbit-2023-08-20/
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/06/758419791/indias-attempt-to-land-rover-at-moon-s-south-pole-fails
https://www.cnbctv18.com/science/chandrayaan-3-cost-budget-isro-launch-july-14-space-lunar-mission-moon-landing-17222551.htm
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29341850
https://apnews.com/article/india-spacecraft-chandrayaan-moon-landing-b31109bb08197f33b829e7a6e4edfc6d
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/23/india-chandrayaan-3-moon-landing-came-at-small-cost.html
https://www.wsj.com/world/india/indias-space-odyssey-to-pulling-off-its-frugal-moon-landing-41104972?mod=djemwhatsnews
https://archive.ph/qR2QW
