(Dobbs) One Of The World's Most Difficult Clubs To Join
Other nations are setting the stage to explore the cosmos.
India landed last week on the moon! A spacecraft called Chandrayaan-3— Sanskrit for “journey to the moon”— made a successful soft landing near the lunar south pole. Nobody has ever gotten there before.
You could be excused if you missed it. Between our first look last week at Republican candidates on a debate stage, yet another look at Donald Trump under arrest and this time with a mugshot to prove it, and maybe yet another murder on Vladimir Putin’s rap sheet, there was no room in the headlines for the story of India’s achievement. But it’s no small achievement. In fact it’s immense.
Until now, only three superpowers had ever pulled it off: first the Soviet Union, then the United States, then China. Now India’s a fourth member of the club. What makes its triumph even bigger is that only four days earlier, a Russian spacecraft called Luna-25 also attempted a soft lunar landing, but failed. It was Russia’s first attempt to put down on the moon since the Soviet era. But as its spacecraft approached, it crashed, or as the Russian space agency Roscosmos put it, “ceased its existence.”
Meanwhile, there’s another rocket called “Smart Lander for Investigating Moon” sitting right now on a launch pad on the southern tip of Japan. After bad weather this week, its launch has been postponed to mid-September but if it lands on its target, it will make Japan the club’s fifth member.
Only one space-faring nation, of course, has put human beings on the lunar surface. Beginning with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in July of 1969, the U.S. did it six times. As Charlie Bolden, himself a retired astronaut and one of the administrators of NASA during the years that I covered the space program, once proudly told me, “Maybe someone will even beat us (back) there. But do you know what they’ll find when they land on the lunar surface? Six flags. And they’re all ours.”
India didn’t put men or women on the moon, just a lunar rover, but what stands out is where it touched down: about 370 miles from the moon’s south pole, where it will search for extractable water. That has been a goal since the early days of space flight. When the Apollo astronauts brought rocks home from their landing sites closer to the moon’s equator, the inference from what the rocks revealed was that the moon is dry.
But as technology progressed, scientists began to conclude that in shadowed craters at the lunar poles which never see the sun, water might exist. Photographs from India’s Chandrayaan mission reinforce the theory.
That’s important for all kinds of future space travel. Whether to be used as drinking water for future space explorers or as an ingredient in hydrogen-based rocket fuels to propel humans deeper into the cosmos, water might be considered the most important gift from space. If India finds extractable water at the south pole of the moon, it can be a game-changer for how humans travel to farther destinations. Launching first from earth to moon, then blasting off again from the low-gravity lunar surface means a lighter lift and more fuel left in the tanks for the long journeys to other planets.
However, while putting an unmanned spacecraft on the moon’s surface is incredibly complicated, the complexities of a manned mission, to support and safeguard the lives of astronauts, are even more costly and more challenging by many orders of magnitude. The head of NASA’s space shuttle program once pressed his thumb firmly to his forefinger and told me in an interview, “When we put people in space, we are always this close to disaster.”
As much as the U.S. achieved more than 50 years ago, we have had to start almost from scratch to put people back on the moon. As of now, with the ingenious scientists and engineers who designed the Apollo program long gone, we still couldn’t do it. But I hope within not too many years, we will.
I had the privilege of watching a couple of Apollo rockets rise from the launch pad in Florida, then I covered the last several years of the space shuttle program and saw almost 40 shuttles blast off.
Every one inspired awe. And every launch was different: different trajectories, different weather, different hours, sometimes different missions.
But the real wonder was the bigger purpose of the program: to explore, to innovate, to discover. Man was meant to do these things. Once it was courageous voyages to the far reaches of the earth’s oceans. Today it is to the far reaches of outer space.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Great story. Thanks Greg
Thanks Greg, this was a fantastic achievement for India and I hope it helps us understand the importance of space and our need to explore it again.