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India Launches Chandrayaan-2 Moon Mission on Second Try

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India’s first moon lander, Chandrayaan-2, launched on Monday, a week after a first attempt was canceled at the last minute.CreditCredit...Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

SATISH DHAWAN SPACE CENTER, India — India is on its way to the moon.

One week after a first attempt was canceled at the last minute, the Chandrayaan-2 mission blasted off at 2:43 p.m. Monday from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India’s southeast coast, carrying an uncrewed lunar lander and the dreams of a nation.

The 142-foot, 700-ton rocket rose on a funnel of fire, ripping through the air perfectly straight and surprisingly fast before vanishing into a thick bank of clouds.

A roaring thunder echoed across the sky.

“The mission has been successfully accomplished!” blared a message from loudspeakers at mission control.

If the rest of the mission goes as well, India will become the fourth nation — after the United States, Russia and China — to land on the moon, more than 200,000 miles away. Its target is a region near the mysterious south pole, where no other missions have explored.

[How to follow the Chandrayaan-2 moon landing.]

This would be a huge leap forward for India’s ambitious space program, and scientists and defense experts everywhere are watching to see whether the country can pull it off.

So are countless Indians. There are few things as unifying for a nation as a successful space program, and, over the past few weeks, Chandrayaan-2 posters have popped up everywhere and schoolchildren have been hunched over mini-Chandrayaans made from empty plastic bottles, learning the physics of rocketry.

The timing could not be better. This weekend was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the anniversary coverage has fanned lunar fever around the world.

Indian officials insist that the timing was a coincidence — they had wanted to launch the Chandrayaan-2 mission a couple of years ago as a space joint venture with Russia. But when the Russians backed out, the Indians needed more time to build everything on their own.

On Monday, a huge crowd of space enthusiasts gathered at the gates of Satish Dhawan Space Center, which sits on an empty, bushy coastal plain.

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Watching the launch near the space center. “Every Indian is immensely proud today!” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.Credit...Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

It was hot and extremely muggy, the kind of weather in which sweat flows freely. Cameras dangled from the necks of spectators. Some people, like K. Kaushal, 8, wore pins saying “I Love India.”

“It’s going to be like a missile going to the moon!” he said right before the launch. “A lot of fire and noise.”

As scientists began the countdown — “T minus five minutes,” “T minus one minute” — huge video screens in the space center’s media room alternated between live images of the rocket on the launchpad and shots of scientists and engineers at mission control, their faces all business.

The mission includes four components: a giant Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle — Mark III rocket (though it is much shorter and lighter than the Saturn V rocket that lifted the Apollo missions); an orbiter; a lander; and a six-wheeled rover.

The purpose is to probe the south pole of the moon for the possibility of water ice and to study deposits of Helium-3, believed to be a future energy source for Earth.

Indian officials say their new generation of sensors, cameras and other equipment could lead to scientific breakthroughs more than 50 years after the first manned mission to the moon.

“Every Indian is immensely proud today!” the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, said on Twitter. “Indian at heart, Indian in spirit!”

The mission was relatively inexpensive in space terms, costing less than $150 million — less than it cost to make the 2014 film “Interstellar.”

But Chandrayaan-2 will take much longer to reach the moon than the relatively straight shot made by the Apollo missions, which cost billions (the presence of humans added to the price tag).

The Indian orbiter will conserve fuel by making ever-widening orbits around Earth before being captured by the moon’s gravity and pulled into lunar orbit.

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The 142-foot, 700-ton rocket rose on a funnel of fire, ripping through the air before vanishing into a thick bank of clouds.Credit...Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

The big moment should come in early September. That’s when the lander is expected to break off from the orbiter and gently land on the moon’s surface. Because of the delay in communicating across such far distances, the engineers and scientists back at mission control won’t be able to help much. The lander will essentially be on autopilot, and a computer will be in charge of firing the various thrusters and steering the lander safely down.

“It will decide on its own and make decisions,” said Vivek Singh, a spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization, India’s version of NASA.

When an Israeli mission tried this in April, their lander crashed.

But the Indians are supremely confident they can do it.

The launch on Monday was “the beginning of a historical journey,” said K. Sivan, the chairman of the space agency.

Mr. Sivan stood at a podium in mission control, and as he spoke, the scientists and engineers around him cheered. A week earlier, the first scheduled launch had been scrapped with less than an hour to go. Engineers had detected a loss of pressure in one of the helium tanks that are part of the rocket’s engine system.

But, Mr. Sivan said, “We fixed that technical snag now and ISRO bounced back with flying colors!” Huge applause broke out.

If the soft landing works, Chandrayaan’s little solar-powered rover will venture out and perform experiments, such as collecting soil samples from the moon’s crust.

The mission has been timed for the beginning of a moon day, so the rover can get maximum sunlight.

Indian scientists said that they had built a small cushion into their timing of orbiting the Earth and that the one-week delay would not affect the intended landing date.

But, Mr. Singh admitted, “Some of our flexibility will be reduced.”

But those issues were far from the minds of the space enthusiasts who had been looking forward to this launch for months and stood with their heads tilted back on Monday, relishing the few seconds of seeing a rocket fly.

“It was so beautiful to see it disappear into the clouds,” said Neeraj Ladia, an executive at a private space education company called Space India.

“And then that roar. It was so much louder than I expected. It was marvelous.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: This Time, India’s Moon Launch Succeeds. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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