Why India’s moon landing is about a lot more than exploring the lunar surface

A growing number of countries are entering a new space race – but the moon might just become a staging post in bigger ambitions to colonise Mars, writes Andrew Griffin

India’s ‘Chandrayaan-3’ has successfully landed on the Moon (AP)

Strewn across the moon – alongside the bibles and golf balls left by there by Apollo astronauts – are the remains of our attempts to get there. The most recent detritus was left when Russia’s Luna-25 lander failed in its mission just a few days ago, but the wreckage joined that of a host of other crashed landers: the vehicle belonging to an Israeli start-up that aimed to achieve the first privately funded moon landing; a UAE-owned lander that crashed earlier this year; and the one that was used in India’s failed attempt in 2019.

And so India’s successful landing of its new probe, Chandrayaan-3, is an exceptional achievement in its own right. The country’s space agency announced today that it had successfully achieved a “soft landing” on the surface of the moon, a historic and unprecedented moment.

It did it on a tiny budget – less than half of what it cost to make the film Interstellar – and in doing so became only the fourth nation to land on the lunar surface, and the first to land near the moon’s south pole. Humanity has been exploring the moon since 1959, when the Russian Luna-2 vehicle was intentionally crashed into its surface, but it has not got much easier.