India's space programme suffered a huge setback Saturday after losing contact with an unmanned spacecraft moments before it was due to make a historic soft landing on the Moon. Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought to comfort glum scientists and a stunned nation from mission control in Bangalore, saying India was still "proud" and clasping the visibly emotional space agency head in a lengthy hug.
Blasting off in July, the emerging Asian giant had hoped to become just the fourth country after the United States, Russia and regional rival China to make a successful Moon landing, and the first on the lunar South Pole. But in the early hours of Saturday local time, as Modi looked on and millions watched nationwide with bated breath, the Vikram lander - named after the father of India's space programme - went silent just 2.1 kilometres (1.3 miles) above the lunar surface.
Its descent had been going "as planned and normal performance was observed", Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman Kailasavadivoo Sivan said. "Subsequently the communication from the lander to the ground station was lost," he said after initial applause turned to bewilderment at the operations room. "The data is being analysed." The Chandrayaan-2 ("Moon Vehicle 2") orbiter, which will circle and study the Moon remotely for a year, is however "healthy, intact, functioning normally and safely in the lunar orbit", the ISRO said.
Freshly re-elected Modi had hoped to bask in the glory of a successful mission, but on Saturday he deftly turned consoler-in-chief in a speech at mission control broadcast live on television and to his 50 million Twitter followers.
"Sisters and brothers of India, resilience and tenacity are central to India's ethos. In our glorious history of thousands of years, we have faced moments that may have slowed us, but they have never crushed our spirit," he said.
"We have bounced back again," he added. "When it comes to our space programme, the best is yet to come."
Other Indians also took to Twitter to offer words of encouragement. "The important thing is we took off and had the Hope and Belief we can," said Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan. Indian media offered succour by quoting a NASA factsheet that said out of 109 lunar missions in the past six decades, 48 have failed.
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