Space Agencies and Missions of the World: Exam Notes

Space questions in general awareness papers fall into three baskets: which agency belongs to which country and where it works, who did a thing first, and what a named mission was meant to do. None of those facts changes, so the whole chapter can be learnt as a table of names, years and firsts. Indian missions are asked most often, followed by the great firsts of the Soviet Union and the United States.

The major agencies

The European agency launches from the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou in French Guiana, close to the equator, where a rocket gains the most from the spin of the earth. That is also why India launches from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

The Indian programme

India's space work began with the Indian National Committee for Space Research set up in 1962 under Vikram Sarabhai, who is called the father of the Indian space programme. The first sounding rocket rose from the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station near Thiruvananthapuram on 21 November 1963. ISRO itself was formed on 15 August 1969, and the Department of Space was created in 1972. India's first satellite, Aryabhata, was launched on 19 April 1975 with Soviet help, and the first satellite placed in orbit by an Indian rocket was Rohini, carried by the SLV-3 in July 1980.

• PSLV, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, is the workhorse; in February 2017 a single PSLV flight placed 104 satellites in orbit.
• GSLV carries heavier communication satellites and uses a cryogenic upper stage; the heavier LVM3 launched the Chandrayaan missions.
• Centres to remember: the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre at Thiruvananthapuram for launch vehicles, the U R Rao Satellite Centre at Bengaluru for satellites, the Space Applications Centre at Ahmedabad, and the National Remote Sensing Centre at Hyderabad.
• Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian in space in April 1984, flying aboard a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft to the Salyut 7 station.

India's missions to the Moon, Mars and Sun

Chandrayaan-1, launched on 22 October 2008, carried the Moon Impact Probe and found evidence of water molecules on the lunar surface. Chandrayaan-2, launched on 22 July 2019, placed a working orbiter around the Moon although its lander did not survive the descent. Chandrayaan-3, launched on 14 July 2023, landed the Vikram lander with the Pragyan rover near the lunar south pole on 23 August 2023, making India the fourth country to soft land on the Moon and the first to do so in that region; 23 August is now observed as National Space Day. The Mars Orbiter Mission, also called Mangalyaan, was launched on 5 November 2013 and entered Mars orbit on 24 September 2014, making India the first country to reach Mars at its first attempt. Aditya-L1, launched on 2 September 2023, studies the Sun from a halo orbit around the first Sun-Earth Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometres from the earth. AstroSat, launched in 2015, was India's first dedicated astronomy satellite, and Gaganyaan is the programme meant to carry Indian astronauts on an Indian rocket.

The great firsts

• Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957, was the first artificial satellite of the earth; Sputnik 2 carried the dog Laika.
• Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first human in space on 12 April 1961 aboard Vostok 1, and Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in 1963. Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk in 1965.
• Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin on the Moon on 20 July 1969 while Michael Collins stayed in orbit; Luna 9 of the Soviet Union had made the first soft landing there in 1966.
• Viking 1 of NASA made the first successful landing on Mars in 1976; later rovers include Curiosity and Perseverance, which carried the small Ingenuity helicopter.
• Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is the most distant human-made object and has passed into interstellar space; Voyager 2 alone has flown past all four giant planets.
• The Hubble Space Telescope was placed in orbit in 1990 by NASA with the European agency, and the much larger James Webb Space Telescope was launched in December 2021.
• China's Chang'e 4 made the first landing on the far side of the Moon in January 2019, Chang'e 5 brought back lunar samples, and the Tianwen-1 mission landed the Zhurong rover on Mars in 2021.
• The International Space Station, in orbit since 1998, is run by the agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada; Salyut 1 of 1971 was the first space station and Mir followed it.

What to keep in mind

Note the difference between an agency and a mission, because papers mix them: Roscosmos is an agency, Luna a mission; CNSA is an agency, Chang'e a mission. Note also which country was first and which was fourth, since the Moon landing question is usually about India being the fourth to soft land, after the Soviet Union, the United States and China. Finally, remember that the Mars Orbiter Mission is celebrated for succeeding at the first attempt and for its low cost, not for landing, since it only orbited the planet.