Space May Be The Final Frontier, But It’s Made in a Bollywood Basement

4 min readAug 24, 2023

According to mainstream press, India took one large leap for Indian-Kind this week by safely landing a spacecraft on the moon. Per Reuter’s:

An Indian spacecraft became the first to land on the rugged, unexplored south pole of the moon on Wednesday in a mission seen as crucial to lunar exploration and India’s standing as a space power, just days after a similar Russian lander crashed.

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“India is on the moon,” said S. Somanath, chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as the Chandrayaan-3 landed, making India the fourth nation to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon after the United States, China and the former Soviet Union.

However, just like all other countries’ outer space and moon expeditions, India’s landing was fake and staged. Thus, they’ve succeeded in becoming the fourth nation to pretend to land something on the moon. Here are a few official clips from their big milestone:

Video: India Successfully Lands Spacecraft on Moon's Surface

The control room at the Indian Space Research Organization erupted in cheers when the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed…

www.nytimes.com

In this first video, we see a yellow spacecraft with blue nitro blasters hover above a low quality rendering of what is supposed to be the moon’s surface. The video, if we are to call it that, has an extremely low frame rate, akin to that of a glitched-out Atari video game. We see the nitro blasters change shape, and then the spacecraft appears to touch down on the surface of the green-screen moon. It is clear that it is a superimposed background, as evidenced by the complete mismatch in lighting and lack of any evidence of impact. There are also several fake stars seen in the background. This cardboard production does not appear to concern Indian lawmakers, however, as they are seen clapping joyously as the spacecraft touches down.

In this second video, we see what is purported to be a POV cut of the same scene from above, from the perspective of the spacecraft. The craft now appears to be made of silver tin foil, and the moon is pasty white unlike the pale gray of the previous video and in NASA images. There are no stars in this shot, and we even see what appears to be the curved horizon of the moon in the background! (How big is the moon supposed to be, again??)

As usual, one wonders how India could have gotten a camera onto the moon to film their soft landing, if they’d never achieved a soft landing before. The answer is that NASA helped them out by filming it for them — they hired the same camera man they used to film Apollo 17 leaving the moon (it’s a lonely life up there, but that guy sure has come in clutch!)

The above clip reveals that India has a while to go before they achieve the production value of NASA. Even in 2023 they haven’t neared the capabilities of 1960s NASA. But as we all learn from studying the moon landing, nobody has ever mirrored the capabilities of 1960s NASA. So that’s ok — the good people over in Bollywood will get better with time. A few more billion Rupees from the pockets of the hard-working Indian people, and they’ll be landing on Indian Mars before you know it. Whatever their fate, it is a good thing that they’ve committed funding to such an endeavor, rather than wasting it on irrelevant sideshow issues like hunger and poverty.