India has become the fourth country in the world to reach the Moon after a space race that began in the 1960s and which led the United States and the Soviet Union to explore the satellite for the first time.
The US Space Agency, NASA, is so far the first and the only one that has managed to bring a human presence to the satellite since the historic Apollo 11 mission in 1969.
Since then, twelve astronauts have landed on the moon, have collected samples of lunar rock and have carried out various experiments on ambitious missions, although the last two did so far back in 1972.
The new era of lunar exploration was led by the no less ambitious Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, launched in 2004 for political, scientific and, for the first time, commercial purposes.
Not surprisingly, the Chang’e-5 mission was the first, in 2020, to collect samples that allowed it to be determined that the satellite has a million-tonne water reserve hidden under the ground at its poles and in some craters. .
That is what has moved Russia or Japan and, for the first time, India -with the support of NASA- to join a new space race for the exploitation of this precious resource, since international agreements prohibit exercising any kind of of sovereignty over the Moon, but not its exploitation.
Already in 2019 India tried to reach the lunar south pole with the Chandrayaan 2 spacecraft, but lost communication with it before touching down. Now, Chandrayaan 3 has managed to bring to the satellite a module with an autonomous rover that has numerous state-of-the-art scientific instruments that will allow exploring the possibilities and benefits of exploiting the hitherto unexplored lunar south pole.
Just by landing on the moon, the Indian mission has already opened a new frontier in the so-called space economy, now focused on the possibilities offered by satellite telecommunications. It is a sector in continuous growth thanks to the digitization of the global economy.
The shares of the 13 Indian companies in the space sector linked in one way or another to the mission increased their stock market value by about 2.5 billion dollars, according to data collected by Bloomberg.
The huge amounts of lunar ice are of vital importance due to the possibilities they offer to install stable missions on the satellite’s surface. It is a vital resource for humans, both for hydration and for breathing, since it is relatively easy and cheap to separate oxygen molecules from water.
Hydrogen, likewise, is postulated as an important energy source both in the satellite itself and to place the moon as a base for future explorations. As a fuel, it can do what oil did on earth in the 20th century and make future lunar mining a reality.
The milestone achieved by India opens a path that NASA will follow with the Artemis III mission, which plans to take a human being to the Moon again, although this time to explore the area near the South Pole in the year 2025. The private initiative has an important weight in the mission.
China, for its part, plans to set up a research station near the region and send astronauts by 2030 along with Russia, which lost a spacecraft a few days ago that was also intended to explore the lunar pole. That failed Luna 25 mission will be followed by the already planned Luna 26, Luna 27 and Luna 28 in the coming years.
Japan, which also failed in an attempt to reach this same region, already has an unmanned mission ready whose launch is scheduled for August 26. A private Israeli mission also failed in the attempt now materialized by India, which has other parallel missions in the pipeline.
