Standing at the bottom of his garden, cup of coffee in hand, Gopinath Garirao, 63, peered into the dawn sky and marvelled as the Indian rocket streaked into orbit, fuelled by the hopes of a billion people.

When he was born in 1945 India was still under British colonial rule and more than two years away from the bloody chaos of Partition.

He joined the Indian Railways as an engineer in 1969 – the year that Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon – and worked there until he retired in 2005, on a pension of £100 a month. He has lived through one war with China and three with Pakistan.

There he was, standing outside with his wife, Kalavati Bai, watching the launch of Chandrayaan1 – India’s first unmanned mission to the Moon – from his own back garden.

“I felt very proud to be an Indian,” he told The Times from his home in Sullurpet, six miles from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh.

Yesterday’s launch is especially resonant for Mr Garirao’s generation, who are old enough to have lived through Partition and then witnessed India’s recent reemergence as a world power.

It is not just a landmark for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which has launched dozens of satellites since its founding in 1969 but has never before sent an object beyond the Earth’s orbit.

If successful it will catapult India into the world’s most elite club, ranking it alongside the United States, Russia, Japan and China as the only countries capable of independently reaching the Moon.

It will also mark the beginning of what some experts describe as a 21st century Asian version of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. India is now jostling with China and Japan – Asia’s two dominant powers – to send a man to the Moon by 2025. Even South Korea has its own ambitious space programme.

“In the 20th century the race to the Moon was fought between the erstwhile Cold War adversaries,” said Pallava Bagla, the author of Destination Moon, a history of ISRO.

“In the 21st century those gladiators have been left behind and the Asian nations, on the upsurge, have decided to take their place,” he said. “Chandrayaan is a scientific mission, but it also has implications for global geopolitics. It’s like a coming-out party for India.”

The setting for the historic moment was the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, built in 1971 on Sriharikota island, about 60 miles north of Madras, and now surrounded by a bird sanctuary.

The entrance looks much like that of any other Indian Government compound – a couple of nonchalant policemen, a dirty tea shop, a few stray dogs. Only the two model rockets hint at the futuristic activity within.

At 6.20 am yesterday a 44-metre (145ft) polar satellite launch vehicle blasted off from a launch pad deep within the compound and plunged into the thick clouds over the Bay of Bengal. Nestled in its nose sat Chandrayaan, wrapped in gold-coloured foil like a giant Christmas present.

“Lift-off is normal,” said a crackly voice from mission control. Indian scientists monitoring the launch cheered, clapped and hugged each other, as hundreds of millions more Indians watched live television coverage of the event from their homes.

The 1.38 tonne spacecraft separated from the four-stage rocket about 15 minutes later and began circling the Earth in preparation for its journey onwards to the Moon.

Chandrayaan – meaning Moon vehicle in Sanskrit – will take several days to travel 240,000 miles across space before reaching its final position 60 miles above the Moon.

First it will fire a smaller spacecraft down to the Moon’s surface, carrying an Indian tricolour flag, in an experiment designed to pave the way for further lunar landings.

The mothership will then orbit the Moon for two years, using high-resolution remote sensing to compile, for the first time, a three-dimensional atlas of its surface and analyse its composition.

“This is a historic moment for India,” said G. Madhavan Nair, ISRO’s chairman, shortly after the launch. “What we have started is a remarkable journey . . . to unravel the mysteries of the Moon.”

On board will be 11 instruments: five from ISRO and six from foreign agencies, including Nasa and the European Space Agency. ISRO is footing the £46 million bill for the mission, and will have access to all data from the experiments in an unprecedented example of international cooperation in space.

The results could reveal whether the Moon contains enough water and helium3 (a potential energy source rare on Earth) to sustain human life.

“Man has to go to the Moon,” said Dr T.K. Alex, the head of ISRO’s Satellite Centre, which is overseeing the project. “If something happens to Earth, a natural or man-made disaster, we may also need a colony on Mars.”

The idea of colonising the Moon, let alone Mars, marks a huge strategic shift for India, which has previously focused on cheaper projects with more earthly applications.

India’s modern space programme was conceived by Jawaharlal Nehru, its first Prime Minister, as a peaceful way to lift the country out of poverty. ISRO has concentrated on civilian projects with social or industrial benefits, laying the foundations of India’s recent information technology boom.

Today India has 16 satellites in orbit, supporting telecommunications, TV broadcasting, earth observation, weather forecasting, remote education and healthcare.

Because of an early shortage of funds it also boasts the world’s most efficient space programme, generating income from spacecraft sales and commercial satellite launches.

Now ISRO has far more ambitious and expensive plans. The Government has approved a second unmanned lunar mission, Chandrayaan2, that will land a rover on the Moon by 2010-12 at a cost of £47 million. ISRO is also planning to put its first Indian astronaut into orbit by 2014-16, depending on when the Government approves the £1 billion budget. It has already announced plans to land a man on the Moon by 2020.

The public response to the plans appears to reflect the gulf between India’s consumer class of between 50 million and 100 million people and the rest of the population of 1.1 billion. Poorer Indians tend to say that the money should be spent fighting poverty in a country where 800 million people live on less than $2 a day and 47 per cent of children under 3 are malnourished.

“Will going to the Moon help me to stop pedalling this?” asked Pappu Tiwari, 34, who pulls a cycle rickshaw in Delhi, supporting a wife and four children on 2,000-2,500 rupees (£25) a month. “To me, this space exploration is nothing but a gimmick.”

Wealthy and middle class professionals generally respond that the country lacks good governance, rather than money, and that the space programme benefits Indian industry.

“Poverty and hunger will always remain,” said Rajeev Kapoor, 48, a salesman from Delhi who supports his wife and two children on 5,000-6,000 rupees a month. “By the time the Government would try to eradicate them completely, the world itself would have vanished.”

There is, however, a new impetus for India’s lunar ambitions. Mao Zedong initiated China’s space programme in 1958 with specific military applications in mind and placed it under the purview of the People’s Liberation Army. That head start, combined with a 30-year economic boom, means that China is now years ahead of India on several fronts, as demonstrated in a series of recent breakthroughs. China put its first astronaut in space in 2003, shot down a satellite and launched a lunar orbiter in 2007, and conducted the first space walk by a Chinese taikonaut last month. Beijing now plans to land a man on the Moon by 2024.

Indian officials insist that they are not racing with China, but they have eyed it with suspicion ever since Chinese forces easily prevailed in a brief border war in 1962. Last year India’s army chief spoke in public for the first time of his fears about China’s military space programme and the need for India to accelerate its own.

Other Asian powers have also been spurred into action by China’s success, and by North Korea’s claim to have tested a nuclear bomb in 2006. Japan launched a new unmanned lunar orbiter last year, has plans for an unmanned Moon lander in 2012-13, and is considering putting a man on the Moon by 2025. South Korea accelerated its space programme in 2004 by teaming up with Russia to develop There’s an element of rivalry, but each country has a mix of motivations,” said Bates Gill, the director of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute. “It’s a combination of national prestige and the spin-offs for technology. The third aspect is the military one. The ultimate high ground: space.”

The new “space race” differs from the Cold War because of the lack of ideology and the international cooperation needed for expensive projects like Mars missions, experts say.

“Space is a global enterprise,” said Henry R. Hertzfeld, a professor at the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University. Some foresee a “golden era” of global cooperation. Nasa plans to send astronauts to the Moon again by 2020 and to build a permanent base there. Russia aims to have one by 2028-32.

Nevertheless, most experts agree that space exploration continues to be as much about politics as science – and a few foresee trouble. China, India, Japan, Russia and the US oppose the “weaponisation” of space, but all are developing space technology with potential military applications.

India is the only country with a lunar programme to have signed the 1979 UN Moon Agreement, which bans ownership of lunar resources. None has yet ratified it.

“There is a window over the next 10 to 15 years for countries to think about a resource race in space,” Dr Gill said. “It’s not too early to think about what these countries might do that could avoid conflict in the future.”

HIGH HOPES

1958 China launches space programme

1964 Japan establishes Institute of Space and Astronautical Science

1969 India Space Research Organisation established

1970 China launches first satellite, Dong Fang Hong 1 (The East Is Red 1) – Japan launches first satellite, Ohsumi

1980 Indian rocket places satellite Rohini in orbit

a spaceport and a satellite launch vehicle, due for completion this year

1984 Rakesh Sharma becomes first Indian in space on a Soviet spacecraft

1990 Japan launches Hiten unmanned lunar orbiter

1990 Toyohiro Akiyama, left, a TV reporter, becomes first Japanese in space when Soviet Union flies him to Mir space station

2003 China puts the first taikonaut, Yang Liwei in space

2007 China shoots down one of its own satellites in space. China launches Chang’e unmanned lunar orbiter. Japan launches Selene unmanned lunar orbiter

2008 China completes first space walk by a taikonaut, Zhai Zhigang. India launches Chandrayaan-1

2009 China to launch Mars probe

2010-12 India to launch Chandrayaan-2 Moon lander and rover

2012-13 Japan to launch Selene-2 lander and rover

2014-16 India to send Indian astronaut into orbit

2020 India to land man on the Moon

2024 China to land man on the Moon

2025 Japan to land man on the Moon

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