New Delhi: At Akashvani’s Rang Bhavan auditorium here, ISRO Chairman and Space Secretary S Somanath delivered the Prestigious Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture 2024, titled, ‘Indian Space Odyssey: In Search of New Frontiers’, outlining the past and more importantly, the future of India’s ambitions in the space domain. Somanath said, “Our ambition is to travel from Earth to space with more Indians on board. We will be creating our Bharatiya Antariksh Station, and there we will have regular access to space, leading us to land on the Moon one day. These days are not far away.”
Last month, the Union Cabinet approved the extension of the ambitious Gaganyaan programme to lift humans to Earth orbit using domestic hardware, to include the deployment of the base module of the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, India’s own orbital research platform with regular crew rotations, just like the International Space Station and the Chinese Tiangong Space Station. ISRO will also be returning to the Moon with the Chandrayaan 4 and 5 missions, with the latter being a collaboration with Japan called LUPEX. The two missions will demonstrate sample return and precision landing, which are together in principle all the technologies required for a crewed return mission from the Moon.
Moon Base by 2047
NASA wants to lead the charge for assembling the Artemis Basecamp at the south pole of the Moon, with the Artemis III mission slotted for 2026. China wants to set up the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), in close collaboration with Russia, to rival the Artemis Basecamp. China plans to dispatch a crewed mission to the lunar surface by 2030. ISRO plans to send a crewed mission to the Moon by 2040, and set up its own Moon Base by 2047. ISRO plans to rely heavily on the private sector and academia to realise these ambitions. Somanath praised India’s incredible space journey as a testament to its indomitable spirit, and highlighted ISRO’s commitment to leverage space technology for the benefit of all humans on Earth.
