SINGAPORE _ In early September, if all goes according to plan, an unmanned Indian spacecraft will touch down where none has landed before: less than 400 miles from the forbidding south pole of the moon.
The historic Chandrayaan-2 mission is expected to gather detailed information about water frozen inside large, shadowy craters pocking the rugged lunar surface, discoveries that could be crucial to realizing the vision of humans living on the moon.
Built entirely with homegrown expertise and technology, and for the relatively low price of about $140 million, the mission is a milestone for India's scientific ambitions � and heralds a growing global space race.
Fifty years after NASA's historic Apollo 11 moon landing, a crop of extraterrestrial missions are being planned by the U.S., Chinese and other national space agencies, along with private initiatives financed by tech billionaires.
Chandrayaan-2 � meaning "lunar vehicle" � is due to lift off before dawn Monday from a space station off the coast of the eastern state of Andhra Pradesh. With it, India aims to become just the fourth country after the United States, Russia and China to safely land a probe on the moon's surface.
"Globally this is a pioneering mission for human habitation beyond Earth," said Chaitanya Giri, a fellow of the space and ocean studies program at Gateway House, an Indian think tank.
Carrying more than a dozen scientific payloads, including a NASA tool designed to gather precise measurements of the distance to the Earth, the four-ton craft will initially launch into a lower altitude "parking orbit," then gradually edge closer to the moon before landing near the lunar south pole around Sept. 6, according to the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO.
The lander will then deploy a 60-pound, six-wheeled rover to roll slowly across the lunar surface for about two weeks collecting information before its solar battery runs out. An orbiter is expected to circle the moon for about a year, relaying information and capturing high-resolution images.
"The soft landing is extremely complex, " K. Sivan, ISRO's chairman, said in a video. "We will experience approximately 15 minutes of terror."
Besides measuring quantities of water � which could help in the manufacture of potable water and rocket fuel to sustain future manned missions � the Indian mission is expected to gather data on deposits of materials such as helium-3, which Indian scientists say could be harvested for use in nuclear reactors on Earth.
The mission follows the 2008 launch of the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, which blasted a probe near the south pole that sent back information that helped confirm the presence of water molecules inside the craters, which have been shielded from sunlight for eons.
Six years later, an Indian satellite went into orbit around Mars. This year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the successful test of an anti-satellite weapon, India's first non-civilian space initiative and a sign that the country � soon to surpass Britain to become the world's fifth largest economy � aims to become a comprehensive space power.
The civilian missions have also won attention for being much cheaper than those of other countries, largely because of low labor costs. India's space scientists are paid one-tenth the salaries of their NASA counterparts, according to Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, head of the nuclear and space policy initiative at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
India's $74-million Mars mission cost roughly 11% of NASA's Maven Mars orbiter.
The lunar landing "is clearly a fairly big achievement if everything goes as per the plan," Rajagopalan said.
Most previous lunar landers have touched down near the moon's equator, but the south pole's unexplored craters and ice deposits are of growing interest to scientists and explorers. Over the next five years, seven more space missions from the U.S., Russia and China are planned for the south pole area.
In January, a Chinese probe was the first to land on the far side of the moon, close to the south pole, a mission that state-run media described as a major step toward the establishment of a manned Chinese lunar base.
Partly in response to China's advances, President Trump has called for the U.S. to return astronauts to the moon by 2024, and his administration has said it would consider employing commercial rockets to meet that goal. That could include rockets such as the kind being developed by Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, two of the world's best funded private space initiatives.
India has also announced its intention to launch its first manned space flight by 2022 (an Indian citizen, Rakesh Sharma, went into space aboard a Soviet craft in 1984) and plans to establish its own space station in about a decade. Experts say the missions and aggressive timetables will test ISRO, the low-profile space agency.
"ISRO is still a very small community with a limited capacity and growing sets of demands," Rajagopalan said. "These growing numbers of big missions, especially a space station by 2030, still seem a bit unrealistic and we have not seen the funding allocations for it."
But India's interest in deep space exploration is part of a global movement. This year, an Israeli company, SpaceIL, launched the first privately funded lunar mission by raising $100 million in donations. The SpaceIL spacecraft crashed while attempting its landing.
"I wish the Indian team best of luck," said SpaceIL co-founder Yonatan Winetraub. "Landing on the moon is a hard mission and if they succeed it will pave the way for more private organizations and small countries to do so as well."
