'In last 20 years, India has been ... ': What former Nasa astronaut Steve Lee Smith said on country's space endeavors

Heaping praise on India for its achievements in the space sector, former Nasa astronaut Steve Lee Smith remarked that India had accomplished feats no other country had managed.
"India has been very successful in space over the last 20 years and is very well respected around the world. Mission Over Mars was the first time a country had ever circled Mars on its first attempt.India also landed on the moon last year. In world history, they just did something no one has ever done," ANI quoted Smith as saying.
He expressed his excitement about India's future space endeavors, saying, "And just months later, India is preparing its own capsule to send humans to space and they have named their astronauts. Hopefully, Indian astronauts on an Indian spaceship will go into space."
Smith had earlier lauded India's "audacious" goals and relentless mindset in achieving its lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, surpassing space giants like Russia, Japan, and the US.
Now, Nasa is involved in training two Indian astronauts, one of whom will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) later this year. Isro chairman S Somanath had earlier mentioned that ISRO would likely select four astronauts for training.
India's planned space station, the Bharatiya Antariksha Station, will be built and operated by ISRO, with completion expected by 2035. The station, smaller than the ISS, will have a mass of 20 tonnes and will be used for microgravity experiments, orbiting Earth at an altitude of around 400 km.
Aditya-L1 mission, its first solar mission, achieved a milestone when the Aditya-L1 spacecraft completed its first halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L1 point on July 3.
Launched on September 2 last year, the Aditya-L1 mission is an Indian solar observatory at Lagrangian point L1. The spacecraft was inserted into its targeted halo orbit on January 6 and took 178 days to complete a revolution around the L1 point.