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The chief of India’s space exploration committee declared on Thursday that the country will conduct another mission to the Moon within the next four years to return back samples from the lunar surface. The chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Sreedhara Panicker Somanath, stated that India’s “interest” in the Moon is far from gone.
“I assure you that we will bring some Moon rocks ourselves,” Somanath said, according to the Economic Times, during a presentation at the president’s official house. However, he noted that the mission will not be “easy.”
Somanath elaborated on the proposal, saying that “much more technology” will be necessary to collect things from the Moon and transport them back to Earth. The ISRO hopes to complete the mission within the next four years.
The ISRO chief also confirmed that ‘Gaganyaan’, the country’s ambitious mission to send an Indian astronaut to space, is actively being developed and that service and crew modules have already been designed.
The space agency launched the first of a series of test flights last October in preparation for the manned mission. The basic crew module flipped upside down while being recovered by naval divers after falling into the sea. Next year, the ISRO is scheduled to conduct another experiment to ensure the crew module remains upright after splashing down.
The mission’s crew undertook preliminary preparation at Russia’s Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut preparation Centre near Moscow and is currently undergoing additional training in India.
In October, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over a high-level meeting at which he stated that the ISRO should seek to build a space station by 2035 and send the first Indian to the Moon by 2040. According to Somanath, the ISRO has begun building on a space station “where human beings can go, dock, and work.”
Before the Indian space station is built, a module will be launched “which will be a robotic space station,” Somanath said, clarifying that “the manned space station will come only by 2035 because we need new rockets to do that.” At the same time, he underscored the need to build a “very vibrant” industrial base for space activity in the country. “Today we are hardly 1.68% of GDP of the space economy, which is just not enough for India,” he noted.
On Friday, India’s minister for petroleum and natural gas, Hardeep Singh Puri, told the ANI news agency that the sector will “receive support” to accomplish ambitious targets set by the country’s leadership.