Strewn across the moon – alongside the bibles and golf balls left by there by Apollo astronauts – there are the remains of our attempts to get there. The most recent detritus was left after Russia’s Luna 25 lander failed its landing, just a few days ago, but it joined a host of other crashed landers: an Israeli startup that aimed to do the first privately funded Moon landing, a UAE lander that crashed earlier this year, India’s failed attempt in 2019.
And so India’s successful landing of its new lander, Chandrayaan-3, is an exceptional achievement on its own. The country’s space agency announced today that it had successfully achieved a “soft landing” on the surface, in a historic and unprecedented mission.
It did it on a tiny budget – less than half of 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 South Pole. Humanity has been exploring the Moon since 1959, when the Russian Luna 2 intentionally crashed into its surface, but it has not got much easier.
