Tag: Artemis Accords

JPL layoff isn’t the fall of a civilisation

A historian of science I follow on Twitter recently retweeted this striking comment:

While I don’t particularly care for capitalism, the tweet is fair: the behemoth photolithography machine depicted here required advances in a large variety of fields over many decades to be built. If you played the game Civilization III, a machine like this would show up right at the end of your base’s development arc. (Or, in Factorio, at the bottom of the technology research tree.)

Even if we hadn’t been able to conceive and build this machine today, we still wouldn’t invalidate all the years of R&D, collaboration, funding, good governance, and, yes, political stability that came before to lead up to this moment. As such, the machine is a culmination of all these efforts but it isn’t the efforts themselves. They stand on their own and, to their great credit, facilitate yet more opportunities.

This may seem like a trivial perspective but it played through my mind when I read a post on the NASA Watch website, written by a Jeff Nosanov, a science-worker who used to work with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) until 2019. I was surprised by its tone and contents because they offer a twisted condemnation of why JPL was wrong to have laid off some 530 people last week.

According to CBS:

“The Los Angeles County facility attributed the cuts to a shrinking budget from the federal government. In an internal memo, the laboratory expected to receive a $300 million budget for its Mars Sample Return project for the 2024 fiscal year. Director Laurie Leshin said this accounts for a 63% decrease from 2023.”

Nosanov, however, would have us believe that the layoffs lead to the sort of uncertainties in the US’s future as a space superpower that history confronted the world with when the Roman empire fell, the Chinese navy dwindled in the early 16th century, and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. To quote:

“The leaders of the past may not have known they were making historic mistakes. The Danish explorers who abandoned Canada may not have known about the Western Roman Empire. The Chinese Navy commanders may not have known about the Danish. Lost in the mists of history, those clear mistakes are understandable. Their makers may not have had the same knowledge of world history that we have today. But we do not have the excuse of ignorance.

History shows us both what happens when a superpower abandons a frontier – someone else takes it, and that such things are conscious choices. It is the height of folly, arrogance, and fully-informed ignorance for our leaders to allow this to happen. It will lay morale in a smoking ruin for a generation and hand the torch to China, who will be glad to take the lead. Humans will lead into the darkness, but they may not be American. That may not be the worst thing in the world, but it was not always the American way.”

The conceit here is breathtaking, patronising, and misguided. The fates of empires and civilisations have turned on seemingly innocuous events, sure, but NASA not being able to operate a Mars sample-return mission to the extent it would have liked in 2024 will not be such an event.

There are of course pertinent questions about whether (i) scientific work is implicitly entitled to public funding (even when it threatens to runaway), (ii) space science research, including towards an ambitious Mars mission, mediates the US’s space superpower status to the extent Nosanov claims it does, and (iii) this is the character of JPL’s drive in today’s vastly more collaborative modern spaceflight enterprise.

For example, Nosanov writes:

“JPL has produced wonders that have explored the farthest (the Voyager space probes left the solar system), dug the deepest (rovers and landers exploring the mysteries of life and the solar system underground on other planets) and lit the darkness (examined objects in space that have never – in five billion years – seen the light of the sun) of any of humanity’s pioneers.”

Many other space agencies with which NASA has allied through its Artemis Accords, among other agreements, are pursuing the same goals – explore the farthest, dig the deepest, light the darkest, etc. – with NASA’s help and are also sharing resources in return. In this milieu, harping on sole leadership because it’s “the American way” is distasteful.

As such, as a space superpower, the US brings a lot to the table, but I’m certain we’ll all be the better for it if it leaves any dregs of a monarchical attitude it may still retain behind. Of course, Nosanov isn’t JPL and JPL, and NASA by extension, are likely to have a different, more mature view. But at the same time, I saw many people sharing Nosanov’s post on Twitter, including some whose work and opinions I’ve respected before, but not one of them flagged any issues with its tone. So I’d like to make sure what the ‘official opinion’ is.

The simple reason JPL’s current downturn won’t be a world-changing event is that, despite recounting all those decisive moments from the past, Nosanov ignores the value of history itself. Recall the sophisticated photolithography machine and the summit of human labour, ingenuity, and cooperation it represents. Take away the machine and you have taken away only the machine, not the foundations on which the possibility of such innovation rests.

Similarly, it is ludicrous to expect anyone to believe NASA’s pole position in human and robotic spaceflight is founded only on its Mars sample-return mission, or in fact any of its Mars missions. This fixation on the outcomes over processes or ingredients over the recipe is counterproductive. The US space programme still has the knowledge and technological foundations required to manufacture opportunities in the first place – and which is what other countries are still working on building.

Put differently, that an entity – whether a space agency or a country – is a superpower implies among other things that it can be resilient, that it can absorb shocks without changing its essential nature. But if Nosanov’s expectations are anything to go by and the US falls behind China because JPL received 63% less than its demand from the US government, then perhaps it deserves to.

Realistically, however, JPL might get the money it’s looking for in future and simply get back on track.

The only part of Nosanov’s post that makes sense is the penultimate line: “JPL – and the people who lost their jobs today – deserve better.”

A request to ISRO about Chandrayaan 3

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has said its launch window for the Chandrayaan 3 mission is July 12-19. For now, the mission is expected to lift off on July 14 (at 2.35 pm IST). Chandrayaan 3’s mission is the same as that of its predecessor, Chandrayaan 2, with some marginal additions.

It has the same hardware configuration, including a lander named ‘Vikram’ containing a rover named ‘Pragyan’, attached to a propulsion module. The surface lunar mission has a planned lifetime of 14 days. The lander has four scientific payloads and the rover, two. The propulsion module itself has one. The biggest difference between the two missions, it would seem, are changes to reduce the chances of another crash-landing. As Jatan Mehta wrote in his ‘Moon Monday’ newsletter:

To increase the chances of sticking the landing this time around, ISRO has made several upgrades to the Chandrayaan-2-like lander, such as software improvements to accommodate failure, strengthened legs, a couple of new sensors for enhanced and redundant navigation-related measurements, and better power and communication systems.

Chandrayaan 3’s success will strengthen India’s position within the Artemis Accords, which it signed just last month, because it will make the country one of only four to have landed and operated a rover on the Moon. But as much as ISRO has a good reason to aim for success, it may have an opportunity if the mission fails as well – an opportunity to show that it has matured as an organisation.

The Chandrayaan 2 mission experienced a partial, but significant, failure on September 7, 2019, when its lander, bearing the rover, crashed on the lunar surface instead of gently touching down. ISRO researchers later traced the problem to a glitch in the onboard computer that lowered the amount by which the lander had to decelerate as it descended and an issue in the propulsion system. But a few months passed between the crash and the crash report, and in this time, the public conversation surrounding the accident was a cesspool of hyper-nationalist narratives and counterproductive statements by senior ISRO members.

As soon as news of the lander’s crash became public, ISRO stopped communicating updates, and refused to admit – despite all the evidence pointing that way – it had happened for a full week. In keeping with the national BJP government’s mission until then to make the Indian space programme a matter of national pride by couching its feats in a nationalist narrative, social media platforms were inundated with claims from the usual corners that the part of the mission that had failed was a “technology demonstrator” that made up a minor part of Chandrayaan 2.

Around this time, then ISRO chief K. Sivan also told journalists that the Chandrayaan 2 mission was a “98% success” – a stunningly disingenuous attempt to downplay what had been, until the mission’s launch, the basis of many of ISRO’s claims to greatness as well as which had occupied hundreds of scientists and engineers for several years. Technology demonstrators are important, but ‘Vikram’ and ‘Pragyan’ weren’t just that; more importantly, no way they were just 2% of the mission. Yet Sivan had been the one to say such a thing, even if he later palmed the blame off to a review committee, even as the organisation he helmed made Herculean efforts to reestablish contact with ‘Vikram’. All of this vitiated the narrative of the incident.

To make matters worse, after the lander’s crash on the day, journalists gathered at the ISRO HQ in Bengaluru were treated to a scene as Pallava Bagla shouted demanding Sivan address them. When ISRO members other than Sivan did turn up, he was rude. Bagla later apologised for his behaviour – but not before a senior Congress leader, Abhishek Singhvi, called Bagla “insane” and asked for him to be sacked. It seemed for a time that no one was interested in letting the dust settle.

For those who were plainly curious about the mission’s technical specifics as they existed, the specifics in which ISRO’s lessons for future missions, including Chandrayaan 3, would take root, the sole resource (in my limited experience) was the ISRO forum on Reddit, where independent spaceflight enthusiasts were putting together and combing through photos captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to find the lander’s resting place and clues to the cause of the accident.

The Indian government has a penchant for cutting access to information after major accidents and disasters. It did so after the Joshimath landslip, when ISRO reported that the town had slid by 5.4 cm in 12 days. It did so after it supposedly liberated Jammu and Kashmir by abrogating Article 370 of the Constitution. It did so after the Manipur riots and is yet to restore connections in the state, going so far as to brook long-winded arguments about access to VPNs in the process.

Even before Chandrayaan 2, there were some signs that ISRO had become part of the fold, including – but not limited to – the BJP government’s narratives of ISRO’s feats, the organisation’s increasing opacity, and pettiness in the face of criticism. In 2018, its then chief Sivan said that ISRO would like to lead international efforts to mine helium-3 on the Moon and transport it to the earth, disregarding the unhelpful hype and pseudoscience surrounding the isotope’s potential as a nuclear fuel.

More recently, Sivan’s successor and current chief S. Somanath claimed that India has had a “knowledge society” since “Vedic times”, that Indians’ accomplishments were appropriated by Western scholars who then regurgitated it as their own findings, and that “those working in the fields of artificial intelligence [and] machine learning love Sanskrit”.

These signs aren’t encouraging, but it’s possible to hope that these individuals and their advisors will put ISRO above themselves and their opinions. I sincerely wish that Chandrayaan 3 succeeds to the tune of 100%. At the same time, space is hard, as they say (especially for less-well-funded and less-well-technologically supplied organisations like ISRO).

And in the event of a failure, I hope ISRO will respond by sharing regular and timely updates, answer journalists’ queries, think before speaking, and, overall, conduct itself with the grace of being the premier space-faring body of the Global South.

Note: This article was updated at 5.10 pm on July 7, 2023, to include an issue with the propulsion system among the reasons Chandrayaan 2’s surface mission failed. Featured image: The LVM 3 launch vehicle lifts off bearing Chandrayaan 2 from Sriharikota, July 22, 2019. Credit: ISRO.