To date, only three countries have been able to manage this rendezvous of autonomous undocking in space. The U.S. did so in 1966, with the Gemini-8 mission, which conducted the first-ever docking of two spacecraft in space in the history of mankind. Followed by Russia (erstwhile Soviet Union) in 1969 with the Soyuz and Salyut spacecraft, and China in 2011 by docking its space station Tiangong 1 with the Shenzhou-8 spacecraft. But in 1975, Russia and the US conducted the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, where the Apollo spacecraft docked with the erstwhile Soviet Union’s spacecraft, symbolizing cooperation amidst the Cold War. In 2012, China docked a crewed spacecraft with Shenzhou 9 to their space station. With this achievement, India is only the fourth space-faring nation to carry out such complex maneuvers of docking and undocking with precision (a process which allows for joining or detaching satellites while in orbit).
On January 16, 2025, at 10 am (IST), India successfully executed the Space Docking Experiment (SpaDex) in an unmanned docking by joining two SPADEX satellites, SDX01, which is the Chaser, and SDX02, the Target, each weighing approximately 220 kilograms, into a 475-kilometer orbit as per plan. This is a historical feat for India’s space agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which launched the SpaDeX Mission on December 30, 2024, using the 62nd Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) flight from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota. The original docking was to be conducted on January 7, 2025. It was delayed twice to inspect further a slow drift, which caused the satellites to drift apart and made it difficult to attain a 225-meter distance between the two satellites to initiate docking with accuracy.
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