The Indian Moon Landing
It took billions of dollars and thousands of genius engineers for the United States to land on the moon. If you are somewhat active in the space exploration community, you would have recently heard about India’s impressive landing on the moon. India is now the fourth country to reach the moon after America, Russia, and China. There are two extremely monumental aspects of the moon landing. Firstly, the location of the moon landing was at the South pole of the moon, and the Indian Space Agency had to work with an extremely strict budget. It truly is marvelous.
It appears that after China's moon landing, the trend of landing on new areas of the moon was born. China was the first country to land on the dark side of the moon, which can never be seen by the naked eye. The Indian Space Agency likely saw that and tried to mimic it with their own twist. Instead of landing on the dark side of the moon, they decided to land on the South Pole, which is known for its difficult terrain. The terrain of the moon's south pole resembles that of a cratered landscape.
The South Pole is vital to the advancement of planetary science, as the moon has been known to harbor ice on its south pole. Planetary scientists and astronomers can learn what is beneath this ice and have a perfect fossilization of the lunar’s past. In particular, they would gain information about the chemical makeup of the moon and how it changed during its formation. It would give scientists a better understanding of how moons are created and how they evolve.
But another amazing part of the moon landing was how cheap it was, or rather how strict of a budget the engineers were forced to be on. If you had to guess, how much did it cost for NASA to put a man on the moon? The Apollo missions were roughly $150 billion when you adjust for inflation. For a long time, that amount was seen as necessary to facilitate any sort of extraterrestrial exploration.
However, the Indian Space Agency changed all this with their staggeringly low budget of $75 million. Using not even a percent of what NASA needed to reach the moon, the Chandrayaan-3 was able to do it with a shoestring budget.
It's important to note the importance of this as India will likely have a more dominant presence within the space industry in the coming decades. Their innovative organizations and brilliant engineers is what is going to forge a path for future space exploration. If this type of progress continues, trips to Mars and beyond may become not only a possibility but a tangible reality.
