Shooting for the Moonfrom the Bay of Bengal

"India was preparing to launch its first unmanned space ship to the Moon early Wednesday, part of an effort to assert its power in space and claim some of the business opportunities out there.

"The launch of Chandrayaan-1, as the vehicle is called (it means, roughly translated, 'Moon Craft-1') comes about a year after China’s first moon mission. The Indian mission is scheduled to last for two years, prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon and prospect its surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization, or I.S.R.O. Allusions to an Asian space race could not be contained, even as Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, was due for a visit to China later in the week.

"'China has gone earlier, but today we are trying to catch them, catch that gap, bridge the gap,' Bhaskar Narayan, a director at I.S.R.O., told Reuters.

"The maiden Indian lunar voyage will carry two devices from NASA, one to assess mineral resources on the moon and the other to look for ice deposits in the moon’s polar regions. It is scheduled to be launched from [Satish Dhawan Space Centre] on Sriharikota, a barrier island off the coast of southern Andhra Pradesh state."