The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has planned to launch its third lunar mission Chandrayaan 3 in 2021 following approval from the government along with Human Spaceflight program Gaganyaan in 2022, ISRO Chairman K Sivan said on Wednesday. 

2020 will be the year of Chandrayaan 3 and Gaganyaan, he said, indicating that the lunar mission may spill over to 2021, if not held by the end of the year. In November 2019, media reported that the third lunar mission will be held in November 2020. 

Chandrayaan 3 will be similar to its second mission in 2019, which crash-landed on the moon just moments before it was supposed to soft-land. 

The second mission was undertaken at a cost of 134 million U.S. dollars while the slated third lunar mission would be at 35 percent lower in costs at 86 million U.S. dollars, Sivan said, adding that the agency is looking at over 25 missions in the new calendar year. 

As part of the Indian Human Spaceflight Program, Gaganyaan mission, which will be an Indian crewed orbital spacecraft with three astronauts on board for a minimum of seven days, is planned by 2022, he told a press conference in Bengaluru. 

Four men from the Indian Air Force have been selected to undergo training in Russia from the third week of January for the Gaganyaan mission, Sivan said. 

The Indian space agency that launched 319 foreign satellites in 2019 is planning to build a second space port near Thoothukudi in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, 580 kilometers south of Bengaluru. 

The agency currently has space port at Sriharikota for launching satellites in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh, 353 kilometers East of Bengaluru.

2019 marked the 50th anniversary of NASA's Apollo 11 mission, and the public enthusiasm towards the moon has been growing since U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong step onto the moon on July 20, 1969, for the first time in human history.

NASA announced last month that it has completed the giant rocket that will take U.S. astronauts back to the moon, pledging the mission would take place in 2024.

The space agency plans to land on the moon's south pole in order to exploit its water ice, discovered in 2009, both for life support purposes and to split into hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket propellant.

In January 2019, China's Chang'e-4 lunar probe touched down on the far side of the moon, becoming the first spacecraft to make a soft-landing on the moon's uncharted side, which is never visible from earth. 

China's current lunar program includes three phases: orbiting, landing, and returning. The first two phases have been accomplished, and the next step is to launch the Chang'e-5 probe to collect 2 kilogram of moon samples and bring them back to earth in 2020.

(With input from Xinhua, AFP)