Science Original explainer
From a 1993 workhorse rocket to a soft landing near the Moon's south pole — the story of India's space journey.
On the evening of 23 August 2023, millions of Indians watched a small spacecraft descend towards the Moon on live television. At 6.04 p.m., the Vikram lander touched down near the lunar south pole, and India became the first country in history to land there — and only the fourth to soft-land on the Moon at all. It was the most watched moment in the history of the Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO. But the landing was not luck. It was the result of fifty years of patient rocket building, much of it done on a budget that would embarrass most space agencies.
ISRO was founded on 15 August 1969 by the physicist Vikram Sarabhai, who argued that a poor country still needed space technology — for weather forecasts, for communication, for mapping crops and water. India's first satellite, Aryabhata, went up in 1975, launched from the Soviet Union because India had no rocket of its own yet. Building one took another two decades. That is the story of ISRO in one line: start with what you have, learn by doing, and never waste a rupee.
Every space programme needs a reliable truck, and ISRO's is the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, or PSLV. Its first flight was in 1993, and the first attempt failed. The second succeeded, and the rocket never really looked back. PSLV is a four-stage rocket that mixes solid and liquid fuel, and it has become one of the most dependable launchers in the world. It carried Chandrayaan-1 to the Moon, Mangalyaan to Mars, and hundreds of satellites for India and for paying customers abroad. In February 2017, a single PSLV flight, C37, put 104 satellites into orbit at once — a world record at the time.
PSLV's bigger brother is the LVM3, earlier called the GSLV Mk III. It is the heavy lifter, the rocket that carried Chandrayaan-2 and Chandrayaan-3, and the one being prepared to carry Indian astronauts on the Gaganyaan mission. Its first flight was in 2014. Together, PSLV and LVM3 give India the ability to put almost anything it needs into orbit, without asking anyone else.
ISRO's first Moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, launched on 22 October 2008. It was an orbiter, not a lander, and it carried eleven scientific instruments, including one from NASA. That NASA instrument, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, found the signature of water molecules and hydroxyl ions in the lunar soil — the first clear evidence that the Moon was not the dry, dead rock everyone had assumed. It rewrote the textbooks, and it is the reason every space agency now wants to explore the lunar south pole, where water ice is thought to hide in permanently shadowed craters.
Five years later came Mangalyaan, the Mars Orbiter Mission. Launched on 5 November 2013, it slipped into orbit around Mars on 24 September 2014 — on the first attempt, something no other country had done. The whole mission cost about 450 crore rupees, less than the budget of many Bollywood films, and it made headlines around the world as the cheapest Mars mission ever flown. It worked for years, sending back pictures and data, and it proved that ISRO could do interplanetary navigation on a shoestring.
The Moon missions were building towards a landing. Chandrayaan-2, launched in July 2019, carried a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan. The orbiter worked perfectly, but the lander crashed in the final minutes of descent. ISRO went back, studied the failure, and tried again with Chandrayaan-3 — a leaner mission with no orbiter of its own, using Chandrayaan-2's orbiter as a relay. It launched on 14 July 2023 aboard an LVM3 rocket from Sriharikota, and after a five-week journey it landed on 23 August at a spot later named Shiv Shakti Point.
The landing site matters. The south pole is rugged and poorly lit, but its shadowed craters may hold water ice — and water means drinking water, oxygen, and even rocket fuel for future missions. The six-wheeled Pragyan rover, weighing just 26 kilograms, rolled out the next day and spent about two weeks driving around, analysing the soil. Its instruments detected sulphur in the lunar soil for the first time from the surface, along with aluminium, calcium, iron and other elements. The lander and rover were not built to survive the freezing lunar night, and they fell silent after one lunar day. They had done their job, and 23 August is now celebrated as National Space Day in India.
ISRO's next big test is Gaganyaan, which aims to send Indian astronauts into orbit on an Indian rocket — the first time India will fly people to space on its own. Beyond that are plans for a space station, a return to the Moon with Chandrayaan-4, and more missions to study the Sun and Venus. The lesson of Chandrayaan-3 is not that space is easy. It is that a programme which learns from its failures, spends carefully, and keeps its goals steady can land on the Moon's hardest terrain — and make it look, on a warm August evening, like the most natural thing in the world.
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