Ultra-nationalistic hype – vs- Reality.
With all credits to ISRO for the successful soft landing on the Moon, there’s No Space for these petty political gimmickry in space missions. We should be proud, but not blindly parochial.
If we go by these “stupid assertions”, the ‘Moon already was Soviet and American’ starting in 1966, as Soviet Luna 9, followed by the American Surveyor spacecraft did soft landings.
A FULL 57 YEARs BEFORE Chandrayaan 3.
And no, our Chandrayaan 3 Didn’t land on the Lunar ‘South Pole ‘, but at about 69°S in the ‘southern polar region’. It’s somewhat like going to Falklands Islands, and saying “we have reached Earth’s South Pole” !
The Soviets did both robotic sample return and rover missions, With Luna 16 & 17, in 1970, 53 years before Chandrayaan 3. ISRO will probably target a sample return mission in the next 3 years or so.
Then it ‘became even more American’ as the US of A landed 6 manned Apollo missions – 12 people, and returned them to home, along with lots of lunar rocks and regolith, starting in 1969. Missions which were incredibly more complex than Chandrayaan 3. With rudimentary computing powers then available. In between, the Soviets also did 9 unmanned landings & robotic sample return missions — all by 1976.
The Moon Also ‘became Chinese’ in 2013, a decade earlier, when the Change 3 lander & rover did a soft landing. China also achieved a soft landing on the Far Side of the Moon (at ‘South Pole-Aitken Basin’, on the side we cannot see from Earth) in early 2019. Change 5 was a robotic lunar sample return mission.
And yes, 2 more space agencies, Japans JAXA and European Space Agency ESA have the capability to do soft landings on the moon (the failed Japanese attempt was by a Japanese private company, not JAXA). Japan is soon sending the SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) moon lander to do — for the first time ever — to do an advanced image processing based Precision Landing, unlike previous missions that chose a wide target area.
Not to forget, both JAXA and Europe have achieved ‘landings and sample returns’ from far more distant asteroids, Japan’s Hayabusha 1 doing a landing as early as 2005.
ISRO is still a Champion. Only don’t spoil it’s commendable achievements by the petty-ness of our “political leaders” and the Godi media.
*** SD
