Taking note of India's successful launch of a record 104 satellites, the Chinese media has hailed the significant achievement but at the same time asserted that China was way too ahead of the rising power.

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Scripting history, India on Wednesday successfully launched a record 104 satellites — all but three of them foreign — from Sriharikota and put them into orbit in a single mission onboard its most dependable Polar rocket.

"As a rising power, it has done a good job. It is ambitious but pragmatic, preferring to compare with others as an incentive to progress. India's political and social philosophy is worth pondering," said the China's Global Times.

However, the daily mentioned that India had not yet formed a complete system and China was way too ahead of India's space technology. "The engine of its rockets is not powerful enough to support large-scale space exploration. There is no Indian astronaut in space and the country's plan to establish a space station has not started," the daily stated.

Calling it a hard-won achievement for India to reach the level of current space technology with relatively small investment, it said, "It offers food for thought for other countries. India launched a lunar probe in 2008 and ranked first among Asian countries by having an unmanned rocket orbit Mars in 2013."

The daily also added that India as a hierarchical society also has the largest number of poor people.

As the country seeks a bigger slice of the multi-billion dollar space launch industry, the Indian Space Research Organisation(ISRO) bettered Russian space agency's feat of launching 37 satellites at one go in 2014. The previous highest number of satellites launched by ISRO in one mission was 20 in June 2015.

A majority of the satellites have earth-imaging capability while the Indian cartographic satellite is capable of taking high-resolution images. Each nano satellite weighs less than 10 kg.

The satellites were placed in the polar Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO) in a gap of about 30 minutes during a series of separations.

The complex mission once again proved ISRO's capabilities in undertaking commercial launches with the PSLV achieving its 38th consecutive success.

So far, ISRO has launched 226 satellites, including 179 belonging to foreign countries.