Reuters Science News Summary

Following is a summary of current science news briefs. Modi hails India as military space power after anti-satellite missile test

India shot down one of its own satellites in low-Earth orbit with a ground-to-space missile on Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, hailing his country's first test of such weaponry as a breakthrough establishing it as a military space power. India would be the fourth country to have used such an anti-satellite weapon after the United States, Russia and China, according to Modi, who heads into general elections next month. Trump administration calls for putting Americans back on moon by 2024

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence announced on Tuesday an accelerated goal of putting Americans back on the moon within five years "by any means necessary," and NASA's top official immediately embraced the challenge. Pence, chairing a meeting of the National Space Council at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, borrowed from the vocabulary of the Cold War era in declaring, "We're in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s." Second Chinese rocket startup fails to put satellite into orbit: state media

A rocket developed by OneSpace failed to reach orbit after lifting off from a state launch facility in northwestern China, state media reported on Thursday, the second failed orbital launch by a privately funded Chinese firm in five months. An anomaly occurred within "tens of seconds" after OneSpace's OS-M1 rocket blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre on Wednesday, the official Technology Daily reported, declaring that the launch had failed.