Bangalore, India
India successfully completed an unmanned space mission this week, a key step in its plan to someday send an astronaut to the moon. The Indian Space Research Organization, India’s version of NASA, said its reusable space capsule—called Space Recovery Experiment—had returned to Earth after 11 days in orbit. “This mission is a steppingstone to designing and building our very own reusable spacecraft, and eventually manned missions into space, too,” said A. Subramoniam, head of the team that designed the capsule. India hopes to reach the moon with an unmanned craft next year and put a human into orbit by 2014. The only other countries with reusable spacecraft are the U.S., Russia, China, Japan, and France.
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