Moonshots and Beyond: India's Remarkable Journey in Space Exploration

Exploring all of India's 124 spacecraft missions with official ISRO data

Chandrayaan 3 was an amazing feat India’s third leg in its mission to explore the moon. A lot of expectations and hopes were set on this one as Chandrayaan 2’s last phase, the launch of the Vikram Lander had failed. In this short data narrative, I want to explore all of the 124 spacecrafts launched by ISRO with data. 

I managed to scrape this data off the official ISRO website. This is what the dataset looks like: 

India launched its first spacecraft, Aryabhatta in 1975 and has launched a total of 124 spacecrafts since. More than half of these 124 have been launched after 2011! This clearly highlights India’s growing pace in the space race.

These spacecrafts have different objectives like Communication, Disaster Management, and Navigation. It is interesting to note that more than half of the total launches are designated for the purposes of communication and earth observation. 

While it is well-known that other space organisations like NASA enjoy a higher success rate than ISRO, it cannot be reduced to a simple comparison. Each Space Administration has different ambitions, objectives and most importantly budgets. Despite its developing country status, India has pulled-off a less than 10% failure rate since 1975. And this rate is getting even lower. Since 2000, this rate has reduced to 6%.

I could not infer the entire dataset as I don’t understand beyond the basics of astrophysics. However, I do plan on expanding on this in a new edition by collaborating with friends of mine who do. Stay tuned!

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