India manages to dock satellites in space making it the 4th ever nation to do so!

January 17, 2025

Just yesterday, the ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) posted on social media platform X announcing the successful docking of two of its satellites in space. This marks a huge milestone for the nation as it becomes the fourth ever to achieve such a feat. Let’s take a quick peek at India’s historical satellite docking in space and what it could entail for the future!

SpaDEX Mission

SpaDEX or Satellite Docking Experiment consisted of two satellites “Chaser” and “Target” launched into slightly different orbits on December 30, 2024. These satellites each weighed about 220 kilograms and were blasted off in the same rocket from Satish Dhawan Space Center in Andra Pradesh.

Yesterday, these separate entities managed to dock into one marking a ‘significant stepping stone for India’s space missions in the years to come’ according to Prime Minister Modi. The official announcement made on X talks about the docking process in short with a hearty congratulations to the team.

SpaDeX Docking Update:

🌟Docking Success

Spacecraft docking successfully completed! A historic moment.

Let’s walk through the SpaDeX docking process:

Manoeuvre from 15m to 3m hold point completed. Docking initiated with precision, leading to successful spacecraft capture.…

— ISRO (@isro) January 16, 2025

But it was not smooth sailing to get to this point. ISRO said that it had to postpone the docking process twice, once because of ‘requiring further validation’, and the second time because of excess drift between the Chaser and Target. Regardless, on the 16th of January, 2025, the Chaser was successfully able to connect with the Target which will now be controlled as a single entity after docking.

History in the making

Besides India, only the USA, Russia, and China have managed to pull this off till now, so it’s an achievement that propels India into the global elite. The country was able to land a satellite on the south pole of the moon for the first time ever in 2023 and there are even plans for an Indian Space Station by 2035. Safe to say, Modi was serious when he said that they would send an Indian astronaut to the moon by 2040.