The Chandrayaan-3, a 'follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface,' was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, on Friday. The blastoff of the spacecraft — onboard India's heaviest launch vehicle, the Launch Vehicle Mark-3 — became one of the most popular broadcasts of the year across platforms and ended as the week's top stream.
The Chandrayaan-3 consists of Lander and Rover configuration, with the propulsion module carrying the lander and rover configuration till a 100 km lunar orbit. As per ISRO, the flight will arrive in lunar orbit on August 5 and attempt a soft landing on the Moon on August 23.
As per India's Union space minister Jitendra Singh, it "will take up the exploration of the Moon will take up the exploration of the Moon where India's first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, left and in the process will also look for resources that could sustain life on the Earth's natural satellite."
The stream of the spacecraft's take-off from July 14 on YouTube registered 1.1M Hours Watched, 1.8M Peak Viewers, and 778K Average Viewers over one hour and 25 minutes of airtime. This made it the most popular broadcast on the red platform for the week between July 9 and July 15, doing 88.9% better than the second-best entry — also Indian.
When looking at the overall popularity of channels across platforms for the year, this clip placed sixth. Leading the pack is another broadcast from India, with the launch event of the OnePlus Nord doing an astounding 9.2M PV.
There is also a Twitch and NimoTV representative in this top ten list, with ibai's record-breaking La Velada del Año 3 boxing event hitting 3.44M PV to give the former a top three position. Regarding the Chinese video live streaming service, its milestone stream came at the Nimo TV Global Gala 2023, where it notched 3.04M PV, becoming the platform's most successful stream ever and putting it fourth on the standings in question.
Interestingly, another rocket's launch stream, from SpaceX, is eighth on this leaderboard with 1.67M PV. There might just be something in the air when it comes to such broadcasts and their propensity to pull in viewers that could come in handy for researchers down the line!