Indias ambitious attempt to land on the unexplored polar south of the moon has ended in disaster. With less than two miles to a place in history, Vikram lander (named after Vikram Sarabhai, who cradled the Indian Space sciences in their infancy) landed beyond ISROs reach, a live broadcast. It was set to countdown to this new milestone, showed tensed scientists attempting to retain control, but all signals were eventually lost.

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who was also present for the occasion, took the failure. With a pinch of salt, he offered encouragement to the team of scientists and children that had accompanied him to the ISRO campus.

Be courageous. Our faith in ISRO has not lost. I can proudly say that the effort was worth it and so was the journey. We are full of confidence that when it comes to our space program, the best is yet to come,he stated, lauding the ISRO.

Scientists and employees view the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft Lander module at the Indian Space Research Organization Satellite Integration and Test Establishment (ISITE) at the ISRO headquarters in Bengaluru, India, on Tuesday, June 12, 2019. India will launch a lunar mission on July 15, attempting to become the fourth country to land on the moon and cementing its place among the world's space faring nations. Photographer: Karen Dias/Bloomberg

India would have been the fourth country to complete a lunar soft landing

Space is a difficult terrain to conquer, and the lunar surface lays polluted with failed attempts. These failures are mostly attributed to the lack of atmosphere on the moon, which renders parachutes useless. The landers are left solely at the mercy of thrusters to cushion the landing. The difficulty can be evaluated from the fact that had the landing been successful. India would have been only the fourth country to complete a lunar soft landing - with the former Soviet Union, the US, and China having achieved it thus far - and the first to do so on the lunar South Pole.

K. Sivan, Indian Space Research Organizations chairman stated that"Vikram lander descent was as planned and normal performance was observed till the altitude of 2.1 km. Subsequently, the communication from the lander to the ground station was lost. The data is being analyzed,CNN reported.

Not a complete failure

The mission, however, was not a complete failure. Chandrayaan-2, a $140 million mission, partially intends to study the possibility of water deposits further within the moon carters, first highlighted by Chandrayaan-1 in 2008. The 142-foot tall spacecraft that blasted off the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh on the 15th July, under this mission carried an orbiter, the Vikram lunar lander, and a six-wheeled rover. The orbiter that had detached from the lander earlier this week can expectedly continue to operate for about seven years. The failure of the Vikram lander, interestingly, comes, just months after Indias close ally Israel's first moon mission, Beresheet, met a similar fate.

But unlike Beresheet, Chandrayaan-2's mission still lives on in the orbiter that will continue to orbit the moon, albeit alone. Tentative plans for Chandrayaan-3, indicate a third mission to the moon in 2024. Like Chandrayaan-2, it too is expected to contain a moon rover.

ISRO has come a long way!

While the price tag of failure seems heavy on the paper, it is important to mention here that the ISRO has come a long way in specialized low-costing space launches since the early 1960s, when the components assembled by hand and transported via bicycles. ISROs maiden interplanetary mission, with the launch of the Mars orbiter in 2013 cost just $74 million, a remarkable nine times cheaper than what NASA could manage in the same year. The cost-effectiveness allowed ISRO to launch a record 104 satellites in under 18 minutes, in 2017.

Earlier this year, ISRO stated that it intends to have its operational space station soon, to allow conducting separate missions to study the Sun and Venus. Work on the space station is expected to begin following ISROs first manned space mission, coined Gaganyaan (Sanskrit for space vehicle), to which the government has allotted $1.5 billion. The Gaganyaan purpose is set to stage in 2022, just in time to celebrate 75 years of Indian independence from Britain.

Indias attempt to make the history by becoming the fourth nation to land on the Moon failed. After journeying millions of kilometers and coming excruciatingly close, the lander lost the contact in the last few hundred meters, crash landing on the lunar surface. However, ISRO has still not admitted defeat and they will try connecting to Vikram for the next two weeks more.

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Chandrayaan 2: India's Moon Mission - A Failure or Not - Forbes