Why Every Space Agency Is Racing to Reach Mars, And What ISRO's Role in This Planetary Race Means for India

You cannot go to Mars whenever you feel like it. Earth and Mars align for a fuel-efficient transfer orbit once every 26 months, a window that lasts only a few weeks. Miss it, and you wait over two years for the next one. Every agency racing toward Mars right now is racing toward a calendar, not just a planet. The 2024 window opened in late 2024. The next opens in early 2027. The one after that, in 2029, is when several crewed mission timelines start to converge. This is why the announcements cluster. The orbital mechanics force everyone to move at the same pace or fall a full cycle behind.
The Hohmann transfer trajectory, the minimum-energy path from Earth to Mars, takes roughly seven months. A spacecraft launched during the window arrives when Mars is positioned to receive it. Launch outside the window and the fuel cost becomes prohibitive for any current propulsion system. This shared constraint is one reason the Mars race looks coordinated even when it isn't. China's Tianwen-1 launched in July 2020, alongside NASA's Perseverance rover and the UAE's Hope orbiter. Three missions from three different programmes, launched within weeks of each other, all exploiting the same orbital window.NASA's Perseverance rover has been operating on the Martian surface since February 2021, collecting rock core samples from Jezero Crater, an ancient lake bed. The plan is to return those samples to Earth through the Mars Sample Return mission, a joint NASA-ESA effort that has faced significant budget pressure but remains the most scientifically ambitious Mars project ever attempted. Perseverance has also operated the Ingenuity helicopter, the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet, completing over 70 flights before its rotor was damaged in January 2024.
China's Tianwen-1 successfully deployed the Zhurong rover in May 2021, making China only the second country to operate a rover on Mars. The UAE's Hope orbiter reached Mars orbit in February 2021 and has been transmitting detailed atmospheric data ever since, a remarkable achievement for a programme that was only founded in 2006.
ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter continues to map methane fluctuations in the Martian atmosphere, data that bears directly on the question of whether microbial life could exist below the surface. Methane on Mars has no confirmed source. Its seasonal variation is one of the most debated findings in planetary science.

NASA is also developing the Space Launch System for eventual crewed Mars missions, though the current Artemis programme targets the Moon first, with Mars as the stated next destination. SpaceX's Starship, designed explicitly for Mars, has completed several full-stack test flights from Boca Chica, Texas, with Elon Musk publicly targeting crewed Mars landings in the late 2020s, a timeline most independent aerospace analysts consider optimistic by at least a decade.Mars has water. Not oceans, but confirmed water ice at both poles, subsurface ice deposits mapped by radar, and perchlorate salts in the soil that suggest liquid water may have existed far more recently than previously thought. NASA's MAVEN orbiter has shown that Mars once had a thicker atmosphere, stripped away by solar wind over billions of years after the planet lost its global magnetic field. The surface conditions today, an average temperature of around minus 60 degrees Celsius, atmospheric pressure less than 1 percent of Earth's, are brutal. But they are not impossible to engineer around, the way Jupiter or Venus are.
Mars also has a day length close to Earth's, 24 hours and 37 minutes. Its axial tilt is similar to Earth's, producing recognisable seasons. These facts matter for long-duration human presence in ways that sound almost mundane until you consider the alternatives. A day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days. A day on Mercury is 59 Earth days. Mars is the only planet in the solar system where a human body could maintain a biological rhythm without pharmaceutical intervention.

The planet also has accessible resources. CO2 makes up 95 percent of the Martian atmosphere, and NASA's MOXIE experiment aboard Perseverance has already demonstrated that oxygen can be extracted from it. Water ice can be converted to rocket propellant. These facts make Mars the only realistic candidate for a self-sustaining human outpost within the next century.ISRO's Mangalyaan, Mars Orbiter Mission, reached Mars orbit in September 2014 on its first attempt, making India the only country to succeed on a maiden Mars mission and the first Asian nation to reach the planet. The mission cost approximately ₹450 crore, making it one of the most cost-efficient interplanetary missions ever flown. Mangalyaan operated for nearly eight years before contact was lost in 2022, far exceeding its designed six-month lifespan.
A second Mars mission has been in discussion within ISRO for several years. While no confirmed launch date has been announced, the scientific case is strong: a lander and rover capability that Mangalyaan did not carry, atmospheric science instruments, and potentially a contribution to the international sample return chain. ISRO's demonstrated ability to reach Mars at a fraction of the cost of comparable NASA or ESA missions gives India a credible seat at the table for any multilateral Mars exploration architecture.

The Gaganyaan crewed spaceflight programme, currently in test phase, is also relevant. Astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla is scheduled to fly to the International Space Station as part of the AXIOM-4 mission, a step that builds the human spaceflight experience ISRO will need if crewed deep-space missions ever become a national priority. The path from low Earth orbit to Mars is long, but ISRO has already walked the hardest part of it: getting to Mars at all.The Mars race is not purely scientific. Space law, specifically the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, prohibits national sovereignty claims over celestial bodies but says little about resource extraction. The Artemis Accords, signed by India in 2023, establish a framework for how participating nations will share data, establish safety zones, and handle resource use on the Moon, and by extension, eventually on Mars. Nations that sign early help write the rules. Nations that arrive late inherit them.
China has not signed the Artemis Accords and is developing its own Mars exploration roadmap independently, including a stated goal of a crewed Mars mission by 2033. Whether that timeline holds is secondary to the strategic signal it sends. The country that establishes the first permanent human presence on Mars will have an outsized influence on how the planet is governed, used, and accessed, long before any international body has the authority to say otherwise.
The race to Mars, then, is also a race to be present when the first decisions get made. Mangalyaan proved India can get there. The question now is whether ISRO's next Mars mission arrives in time to be part of those decisions, or whether India watches them being made by others.
Every mission currently pointed at Mars is carrying its own flag, its own scientific instruments, and its own national calculation. The orbital window does not care about any of that. It opens, and then it closes, and the ones who were ready go.