Italy Shares India’s Moon Success
The Italian group Zoppas Industries, a global supplier for the design, manufacture, and sale of heating elements and systems in the world market, supplied all the heaters used in the Indian Chandrayaan-3 mission.
The success of the Indian space mission that launched the Chandrayaan-3 automatic station to the Moon on July 14, 2023 and landed the Vikram descent vehicle near the satellite’s south pole on August 23 was accomplished, at least in part, thanks to Italian advanced technology that Zoppas Industries provided to the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
According to information publicized by the Italian news agency Radiocor Il Sole 24 Ore, “the three components of the mission – the propulsion module installed on the Chandrayaan-3 space station, the Vikram lander, and the Pragyan lunar rover – were fully equipped (both for ground testing and spaceflight) with several hundred complex flexible polyamide heaters, all designed and manufactured by IRCA-Zoppas Industries at the Vittorio Veneto plant.
“We at Zoppas Industries have been in this game for many years,” president of Zoppas Industries, Gianfranco Zoppas, told Radiocor. “Part of 4-5% of our investment in research goes in this direction, which is not a change of essence for the Group, but a continuation of the work that had started at the time of the first Moon landing. Back then, being in California, I began to express interest in space programs and possible products that could be created for this purpose.”
IRCA-Zoppas Industries was previously involved as a frontline player in NASA’s Artemis mission, to which the Veneto-based company contributed by providing the heaters used in the service module of the Orion launch vehicle.
Now, Zoppas Industries’ nearly decade-long partnership with the Indian Space Agency continues through the Human Space Flight Center (HSFC) in Bangalore on a new and rather ambitious manned spaceflight mission titled Gaganyaan. This provides for the 2025 launch of an orbital spacecraft with a crew of three people into a 400-kilometer high orbit with a duration of 5-7 days.
