India's space and defence missions need whole-hearted attention and support, so that scientists and engineers can make India self-reliant in critical technologies
INDIA’S SPACE PROGRAMMES are soaring to greater heights, literally. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is spreading its wings for bigger horizons, and is confidently venturing into new areas of space research.
ISRO’s latest success is to become the first nation globally to pull off an efficient and flawless Mars Orbiter Mission, when an experiment vehicle was placed in Mars’ orbit. That was achieved by India on September 24 this year and rightly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that day from Bangalore as: “History has been created.”
“We've dared to reach out into the unknown and achieved the near impossible,” Modi said then. No better truth has been spoken so clearly about India’s space programme and what ISRO has achieved in the past two decades or more, despite several odds stacked against it.
Indian scientific institutions working on critical technologies such as ISRO faced global sanctions, wide-ranging as these were, following the Indian nuclear tests of 1974 and 1998. These sanctions were a major impediment for Indian institutions in their scientific growth, but ISRO has overcome the hurdle as no other, despite the Western nations denying it technologies that could have propelled its space programmes to greater heights.
For ISRO, these sanctions and denial of technology were like a blessing in disguise and only propelled its scientists to achieve what no Indian or world citizen has achieved before, including the development of its own cryogenic engine, the Chandrayaan programme to the Moon, and the Mangalyaan progamme to Mars, all in recent times.
In fact, the morale and enthusiasm of the Indian space scientists has been so high that ISRO has been able to beat China in the sector for the first time, with the highly efficient manoeuvring of the Mars Orbiter in the first attempt.
China is definitely better than India, what with its sheer money power, in space research, having had success in anti-satellite technology and putting its first man in space, manoeuvrable satellites and such programmes. India is no laggard, however, and is capable of achieving these technologies, even at this stage, provided there is a political will to demonstrate these capabilities in the Indian government.
ISRO doesn’t seem to be resting on its laurels and has two key ambitious programmes progressing simultaneously, though both are futuristic and may contribute greater value to the agency’s work. In the words of former Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) scientist and recentlyretired chief of India-Russia Joint Venture BrahMos supersonic cruise missile programme A Sivathanu Pillai, India is embarking on a mission to mine the Moon to get to an energy source that could help the nation build its first “hypersonic” aerial vehicles that could touch speeds of 25 Mach or the speed of sound itself!
The energy source that India wants to reach first is Helium-III, which could propel Indian aerial vehicles to attain speeds before achieved by the world community. Pillai was quoted by India’s top news agency as saying that DRDO and ISRO were working on mining the Moon for Helium-III, which has the capability of fuelling hypersonic planes that touch Mach 25 speeds.
But this is an effort that many spacefaring nations have previously tried and failed, and at huge costs at that. That apart, ISRO is also working on putting an Indian in space, without any help from a foreign nation.
The last time an Indian had space travelled was in the mid-1980s, when a large section of the current Indian population was not yet born. In 1984, then Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma, and later Wing Commander, had hitched a ride on the Soviet space vehicle Soyuz T-11 to go into space and return to tell the tale.
In preparation for putting another Indian in space, at India’s own cost and research, ISRO will team up with the Indian Air Force (IAF) soon to conduct experiments on a space capsule to test its capability to carry humans into space, according to ISRO chief K Radhakrishnan.
In the tests, ISRO will drop the capsule from high altitudes and try to simulate a space vehicle’s re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, apart from manoeuvring a soft landing in the sea for the capsule, all to test if it withstands the pulls and pressures of nature, to carrying an Indian on board into space and bring her back safely.
Though it again takes political clearance and government funding for a programme as risky as putting a man in space and then recovering him, the ISRO is earnestly preparing for the same.
Many would argue that ISRO is only trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to space programmes. But one wishes it dawns on the naysayers that when others are progressing into the unknown using that wheel and are denying the know-how and know-why about the wheel to India, it is better to reinvent the wheel rather than remain in the Stone Age of space exploration.
Space programmes have been the most successful for India when it comes to technology capabilities and it has been highly valued by the global community that approach India to place its satellites in Earth’s orbit, thus proving commercially successful, too.
No wonder all other critical technology sectors in India want to be modelled on the space sector. The Space Commission, constituted in 1972, was preceded by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948. However, now we hear cries among the scientific community, particularly in the aerospace and defence research sectors, urging the government to set up commissions on the lines of the Space and Atomic Energy Commission, but with suitable tweaking specific to these two new critical areas of national power too.
The idea of having new national commissions for both aerospace and defence research and development needs the country’s utmost attention and support, so that scientists and engineers in the two sectors get enough boost to make India self-reliant in critical technologies.