Madhavan Nair

Veteran space scientist G Madhavan Nair said on Thursday the Chandrayaan-3 mission to the moon should succeed in all respects so that India can cross a major milestone in space exploration, and described the planned soft landing on the lunar surface as a very difficult and complex maneuver. Speaking to PTI, the former Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, said the mission is an important milestone for ISRO, and noted that the national space agency had made a number of simulations and strengthened the systems to resolve the problem faced during Chandrayaan-2 lander's soft- landing, which was unsuccessful, nearly four years ago. "This moment I can only say that this mission should succeed in all respects so that we will cross a major milestone in space exploration", said Nair, under whose six year tenure as ISRO Chairman and Secretary in the Department of Space from 2003, as many as 25 successful missions were accomplished. On the soft-landing which the ISRO planned to .

As cumulative experience should teach us, fuzzy approaches have costs, so the homework has to be done before signing of contracts, not after, writes T N Ninan

Currently, there is only one fully-functional space station in the Earth's lower orbit, the International Space Station (ISS), and astronauts conduct different experiments in it