Seconds into touchdown, India Vikram Lander lost contact and feared may have crashed onto the surface of the moon. The complex mission when according to plan until the lander just 2.1km above the ground executing a soft touchdown. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) confirmed that it lost contact with the Chandrayaan-2 lander and said it was analyzing data to figure out what happened. Should the mission succeeded, India will be the only fourth nation ever to land on the noon. Three others were the Russian, US, and China. The spacecraft was intended to touch down and explore near the south pole of the moon. One of the prime interests is to study for ice depository, which will be the critical ingredient for human to colonized moon in the near future.

All is not lost, the orbiter, Chandrayaan 2, remains in moon orbit itself is carrying eight scientific instruments which will be used to map the surface of the moon and study the composition on its atmosphere. Just few weeks ago NASA confirmed the presence of water on the moon’s surface by analyzing data collected from one of India’s spacecraft orbiting the moon. “Only 5 per cent of the mission has been lost – Vikram the lander and Pragyan the rover – while the remaining 95%-that is the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter – is orbiting the moon successfully…” said an official of ISRO who did not want to be identified.

India space program is considered as one of the lowest among all other space reaching nation and costing roughly USD 140millions. To put it into perspective, their 2014 launch of an unmanned Mars mission only cost USD 74million, a fraction of the USD 671 million NASA spent on their MAVEN Mars mission. With a total budget of around USD 4 billion, India is heading the right path securing more than USD300 billion global space industry mainly on satellite launches.