The country is also seeking to tie up with other space majors to further its ambitions. After a successful spacecraft landing near the lunar south pole last year, India is planning to develop a next-generation launch vehicle and a new launchpad, with the goal of landing people on the moon by 2040. India's upcoming projects include its first launch of astronauts on a crewed mission, named Gaganyaan, scheduled for 2025. China's National Space Administration launched the country's first X-ray space telescope to observe black holes, pulsars and gamma-ray bursts in 2017. NASA launched a similar mission, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, in 2021 to answer questions such as why black holes spin and build on the findings of its flagship telescope Chandra X-ray Observatory that blasted off more than two decades ago. The satellite, weighing about 1,000 pounds, will carry out research on X-rays emanating from around 50 celestial objects with the help of two payloads built by ISRO and a Bengaluru-based research institute.

Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation. The spacecraft, named X-ray Polarimeter Satellite, was propelled into an orbit of 350 kilometers from an island near India's main spaceport of Sriharikota, off the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, according to S.