Watch this space: Chandrayaan-3, China’s future rocket and a monumental week

But if Chandrayaan-3 goes according to plan, India will enter an even more exclusive club—that of the countries that have successfully carried out a soft-landing on the Moon. Currently, it has only three members—the United States, Russia (when it was the Soviet Union) and China.

India is already a leading spacefaring superpower but it has bigger hopes pinned on the success of the Chandrayaan—that of leading the next space race and the exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The ability to soft-land on the Moon is essential for the country to realise its future exploration goals.

Just like with its predecessor, the Chandrayaan-3 mission lifted off successfully from the launchpad in Sriharikota and the mission module has been injected into the desired orbit. So far everything seems on track for the mission to succeed. The spacecraft will now be conducting orbit-raising manoeuvres to get further and further away from the planet with each revolution around it.

At one point, it will enter a lunar transfer orbit which it will use to go towards the Moon and get captured in its gravity. After that, it will carry out an opposite process on the Moon where it will try to get closer and closer to the Moon till it reaches a 100-kilometre orbit. After that, the Vikram lander will separate from the orbiter component and try to soft-land on the Moon.

The Zhuque-2 carrier rocket, a methane-liquid oxygen rocket by Chinese company LandSpace, takes off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, near Jiuquan, Gansu province, China July 12, 2023. cnsphoto via REUTERS

China’s Methane rocket testing

I did mention the exclusive “soft landing” club of the United States, the erstwhile Soviet Union and China earlier. China’s recent entrance into the club is not the only thing that separates it from the other two. It is also the first and only country to carry out a soft-landing on its first attempt. That is right. The United States and the Soviet Union spent the 60s crashing spacecraft after spacecraft into the Moon, but decades later, China got it right on the first try. They also completed a soft landing on Mars with Tianwen-1.

Our neighbours also went past another important space milestone this week. To be more accurate, a private space technology company based in China went past one—the launch of the world’s first methane-liquid oxygen (methalox) powered rocket.

The Zhuque-2 rocket launched from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 6.30 AM IST on Wednesday, according to Reuters. The rocket was built by Beijing-based private space technology company LandSpace. The company had attempted to launch the rocket in December last year, which failed.

Methane is a strong greenhouse gas, but it burns more clearly than kerosene, which means that it can prevent the build-up of deposits in the engine compared to other fuels like kerosene. This provides for the highest performance and lower costs while also aiding the reusability of rockets.

Methane prevents a build-up of deposits in the engine compared to other fuels like kerosene, a process known as coking, while its higher performance allows for lower costs. It is also considered (relatively) more environmentally friendly. There is also another potential benefit of methane, but it is unlikely that this could be realised within the coming decade—methane based launch systems could tap into methane reserves on Mars to launch from there.

These are just some of the reasons why many companies, including Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin, Rocket Lab and Relativity Space, are trying to build the first methalox rocket. And it seems that Beijing-based LandSpace has beat them all to it.

This stunning Webb image showcases a hotbed of star formation. (NASA, ESA, CSA)

The James Webb Space Telescope celebrates its first year

On any other week, it would be unthinkable that the James Webb Space Telescope would be relegated to a little more than a footnote of the weekly news but unfortunately, that seems to be the case this week.

The Webb telescope is the most powerful space-based observatory in human history and since it shared its first images to the world on July 12, 2022, it has offered our species an unprecedented look into the distant universe, and even within our own solar system.

The Webb telescope has pushed the envelope for what we can discover and study in the universe. From finding the most distant galaxies we know yet to finding out the chemical components of the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet, Webb has done it all. One year into its operation, it is clear that the powerful observatory has only given us a small taste of what it can offer.