BENGALURU, (India): India docked two satellites in space Thursday, a key milestone for the country’s dreams of a space station and manned Moon mission, the space agency said.

The satellites, weighing 220 kilograms (485 pounds) each, blasted off in December on a single rocket from India’s Sriharikota launch site. Later they separated.

The two satellites were manoeuvred back together on Thursday in a “precision” process resulting in a “successful spacecraft capture”, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said, calling it a “historic moment”.

India became the fourth country to achieve the feat — dubbed as SpaDeX, or Space Docking Experiment — after Russia, the United States and China.

The aim of the mission was to “develop and demonstrate the technology needed for rendezvous, docking, and undocking of two small spacecraft”, ISRO said.