It’s been an exciting month for fans of lunar exploration, as the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 mission successfully touched down on the Moon on August 23. Chandrayaan-3's Vikram lander is now sitting comfortably in the south pole region of the Moon, an underexplored area particularly exciting to scientists and prospective lunar mining companies due to its permanently shadowed regions: areas at the bottoms of craters that are never exposed to sunlight, which harbor water ice and other frozen materials.
As of this writing, Chandrayaan-3 has completed its first lunar day on the surface. Daylight on the Moon lasts for two weeks, providing solar power for the instruments on board the Vikram lander and its Pragyan rover. After two weeks of taking measurements and roving the nearby surface, Vikram and Pragyan were put into sleep mode as sunset approached. The mission plan does not expect the lander and rover to survive the lunar night, but if their batteries last for the next two weeks and they respond to communications from the Chandrayaan-3 team when the sun rises again, they’ll be able to continue gathering bonus scientific data.
Chandrayaan-3’s successful landing was especially poignant given the failures that preceded it. Chandrayaan-2 was meant to land in the south pole region almost exactly four years ago in 2019, but crashed on the surface due to errors with the thrusters and software. And Russia’s Luna-25 mission crashed while attempting to land in the south pole region just a few days before Chandrayaan-3’s landing, leaving a fresh crater on the Moon’s pockmarked surface.
Space Agencies: A Brief Tour
Americans have a tendency to focus only on what’s happening inside our own borders, whether that’s the latest launch tests from big-name private spaceflight companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin or the high-budget scientific and human exploration missions of NASA. So in honor of Chandrayaan-3— and the bold but unsuccessful lunar lander missions that came before— let’s take a brief and incomplete tour of the non-NASA space agencies of the world to see what they’ve been working on.
Besides NASA, the largest and most well-known national space agencies in the world are the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and Russia’s Roscosmos. China has been making impressive strides in human spaceflight, launching the first crewed mission to its Tiangong space station in 2021 and recently announcing plans to send a crewed mission to Mars by 2033. Russia has announced plans for its own space station to begin construction in 2025, after it departs the International Space Station program in 2024. Russia and China have also been making plans for several joint missions, including an asteroid sampling mission to launch in 2024 and the eventual construction of a lunar research base.
Another major player in space is the European Space Agency, made up of 22 member states with a 2023 budget of over €7 billion. Aside from their extensive human spaceflight program, ESA also has two scientific missions in space that I’m especially looking forward to seeing the results from: the Solar Orbiter, which has already provided the highest resolution image of the Sun ever taken, and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which is currently on its way to Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa to study their habitability. Other, newer multinational space agencies include the African Space Agency, established in 2018 and hosted in Egypt, and the Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency, formed in 2021 and based in Mexico.
India’s ISRO, of course, is celebrating the success of their Chandrayaan-3 mission and pouring over the data it’s returned already. They’re also planning an upcoming uncrewed test launch of the Gaganyan crew module, which will eventually carry up to three astronauts as part of their developing human spaceflight program. Saudi Arabia is also working to increase their participation in human spaceflight, sending two Saudi astronauts, Ali al-Qarni and Rayyanah Barnawi, to the ISS earlier this year on a private Axiom Space flight. While on station, Barnawi performed research with Expedition 69’s Sultan Al Neyadi, one of the first two astronauts from the United Arab Emirates.
Besides training astronauts, the UAE Space Agency (UAESA) also launched a spacecraft named Misbar Al-Amal (“Hope”) in 2020, which successfully entered orbit around Mars in 2021. The UAESA has also begun planning a mission to orbit Venus and then land on an asteroid in 2033.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) BepiColombo mission (a joint mission with the ESA) is currently on its way to Mercury, where it is expected to arrive in orbit in 2025. And JAXA’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft, launched in 2014, has had its mission extended through 2031 after returning samples of the Ryugu asteroid to Earth in 2020.
The Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s (KARI) Danuri spacecraft reached lunar orbit in December 2022. Phase 2 of South Korea’s lunar exploration plan calls for an orbiter, lander, and rover, to be launched by 2032, and they hope to reach Mars by 2045.
That’s just a small sample of the world’s 90 or so space agencies and a few of their upcoming or in-progress missions. Many of the agencies not listed here are focused primarily on the development of satellite technology to serve their country’s needs, rather than scientific missions beyond Earth orbit. Serendipitously, while working on this month’s newsletter, I spotted this story on the CIA’s World Factbook, which was recently updated to include a Space Programs section on space agencies around the world. So if you’d like a more thorough overview of humanity’s space agencies, that’s a decent place to start (followed, ideally, by online resources from the individual agencies themselves).
Other News
I was interviewed for Philip Ball’s recent piece for The Guardian: “The big idea: should we colonise other planets?”
I also had the pleasure of chatting with Damien Dynan for a recent episode of his Deep Cover Show: