Tag: Gaganyaan

A spaceflight narrative unstuck

“First, a clarification: Unlike in Gravity, the 2013 film about two astronauts left adrift after space debris damages their shuttle, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are not stuck in space.”

This is the first line of an Indian Express editorial today, and frankly, it’s enough said. The idea that Williams and Wilmore are “stuck” or “stranded” in space just won’t die down because reports in the media — from The Guardian to New Scientist, from Mint to Business Today — repeatedly prop it up.

Why are they not “stuck”?

First: because “stuck” implies Boeing/NASA are denying them an opportunity to return as well as that the astronauts wish to return, yet neither of which is true. What was to be a shorter visit has become a longer sojourn.

This leads to the second answer: Williams and Wilmore are spaceflight veterans who were picked specifically to deal with unexpected outcomes, like what’s going on right now. If amateurs or space tourists had been picked for the flight and their stay at the ISS had been extended in an unplanned way, then the question of their wanting to return would arise. But even then we’d have to check if they’re okay with their longer stay instead of jumping to conclusions. If we didn’t, we’d be trivialising their intention and willingness to brave their conditions as a form of public service to their country and its needs. We should think about extending the same courtesy to Williams and Wilmore.

And this brings us to the third answer: The history of spaceflight — human or robotic — is the history of people trying to expect the unexpected and to survive the unexpectable. That’s why we have test flights and then we have redundancies. For example, after the Columbia disaster in 2003, part of NASA’s response was a new protocol: that astronauts flying in faulty space capsules could dock at the ISS until the capsule was repaired or a space agency could launch a new capsule to bring them back. So Williams and Wilmore aren’t “stuck” there: they’re practically following protocol.

For its upcoming Gaganyaan mission, ISRO has planned multiple test flights leading up the human version. It’s possible this flight or subsequent ones could throw up a problem, causing the astronauts within to take shelter at the ISS. Would we accuse ISRO of keeping them “stuck” there or would we laud the astronauts’ commitment to the mission and support ISRO’s efforts to retrieve them safely?

Fourth: “stuck” or “stranded” implies a crisis, an outcome that no party involved in the mission planned for. It creates the impression human spaceflight (in this particular mission) is riskier than it is actually and produces false signals about the competencies of the people who planned the mission. It also erects unreasonable expectations about the sort of outcomes test flights can and can’t have.

In fact, the very reason the world has the ISS and NASA (and other agencies capable of human spaceflight) has its protocol means this particular outcome — of the crew capsule malfunctioning during a flight — needn’t be a crisis. Let’s respect that.

Finally: “Stuck” is an innocuous term, you say, something that doesn’t have to mean all that you’re making it out to be. Everyone knows the astronauts are going to return. Let it go.

Spaceflight is an exercise in control — about achieving it to the extent possible without also getting in the way of a mission and in the way of the people executing it. I don’t see why this control has to slip in the language around spaceflight.

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.”

What Gaganyaan tells us about chat AI, and vice versa

Talk of chat AI* is everywhere, as I’m sure you know. Everyone would like to know where these apps are headed and what their long-term effects are likely to be. But it seems that it’s still too soon to tell what they will be, at least in sectors that have banked on human creativity. That’s why the topic was a centrepiece of the first day of the inaugural conference of the Science Journalists’ Association of India (SJAI) last month, but little came of it beyond using chat AI apps to automate tedious tasks like transcribing. One view, in the limited context of education, is that chat AI apps will be like the electronic calculator. According to Andrew Cohen, a professor of physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, as quoted (and rephrased) by Amrit BLS in an article for The Wire Science:

When calculators first became available, he said, many were concerned that it would discourage students from performing arithmetic and mathematical functions. In the long run, calculators would negatively impact cognitive and problem-solving skills, it was believed. While this prediction has partially come true, Cohen says the benefits of calculators far outweigh the drawbacks. With menial calculations out of the way, students had the opportunity to engage with more complex mathematical concepts.

Deutsche Welle had an article making a similar point in January 2023:

Daniel Lametti, a Canadian psycholinguist at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, said ChatGPT would do for academic texts what the calculator did for mathematics. Calculators changed how mathematics were taught. Before calculators, often all that mattered was the end result: the solution. But, when calculators came, it became important to show how you had solved the problem—your method. Some experts have suggested that a similar thing could happen with academic essays, where they are no longer only evaluated on what they say but also on how students edit and improve a text generated by an AI—their method.

This appeal to the supposedly higher virtue of the method, over arithmetic ability and the solutions to which it could or couldn’t lead, is reminiscent of a similar issue that played out earlier this year – and will likely raise its head again – vis-à-vis India’s human spaceflight programme. This programme, called ‘Gaganyaan’, is expected to have the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launch an astronaut onboard the first India-made rocket no earlier than 2025.

The rocket will be a modified version of the LVM-3 (previously called the GSLV Mk III); the modifications, including human-rating the vehicle, and their tests are currently underway. In October 2023, ISRO chairman S. Somanath said in an interview to The Hindu that the crew module on the vehicle, which will host the astronauts during their flight, “is under development. It is being tested. There is no capability in India to manufacture it. We have to get it from outside. That work is currently going on. We wanted a lot of technology to come from outside, from Russia, Europe, and America. But many did not come. We only got some items. That is going to take time. So we have to develop systems such as environmental control and life support systems.”

Somanath’s statement seemed to surprise many people who had believed that the human-rated LVM-3 would be indigenous in toto. This is like the Ship of Theseus problem: if you replace all the old planks of a wooden ship with new ones, is it still the same ship? Or: if you replace many or all the indigenous components of a rocket with ones of foreign provenance, is it still an India-made launch vehicle? The particular case of the UAE is also illustrative: the country neither has its own launch vehicle nor the means to build and launch one with components sourced from other countries. It lacks the same means for satellites as well. Can the UAE still be said to have its own space programme because of its ‘Hope’ probe to orbit and study Mars?

Cohen’s argument about chat AI apps being like the electronic calculator helps cut through the confusion here: the method, i.e. the way in which ISRO pieces the vehicle together to fit its needs, within its budget, engineering capabilities, and launch parameters, matters the more. To quote from an earlier post, “‘Gaganyaan’ is not a mission to improve India’s manufacturing capabilities. It is a mission to send Indians to space using an Indian launch vehicle. This refers to the recipe, rather than the ingredient.” For the same reason, the UAE can’t be said to have its own space programme either.

Focusing on the method, especially in a highly globalised world-economy, is a more sensible way to execute space programmes because the method – knowing how to execute it, i.e. – is the most valuable commodity. Its obtainment requires years of investment in education, skilling, and utilisation. I suspect this is also why there’s more value in selling launch-vehicle services rather than launch vehicles themselves. Similarly, the effects of the electronic calculator on science education speak to advantages that are virtually unknown-unknowns, and it seems reasonable to assume that chat AI will have similar consequences (with the caveat that the metaphor is imperfect: arithmetic isn’t comparable to language and large-language models can do what calculators can and more).

* I remain wary of the label ‘AI’ applied to “chat AI apps” because their intelligence – if there is one beyond sophisticated word-counting – is aesthetic, not epistemological, yet it’s also becoming harder to maintain the distinction in casual conversation. This is after setting aside the question of whether the term ‘AI’ itself makes sense.

Gaganyaan: The ingredient is not the recipe

For all the hoopla over indigeneity – from ISRO chairman S. Somanath exalting the vast wisdom of ancient Indians to political and ideological efforts to cast modern India as the world’s ‘vishwaguru’ – the pressure vessel of the crew module that will one day carry the first Indian astronauts to space won’t be made in India. Somanath said as much in an interview to T.S. Subramanian for The Hindu:

There is another element called the crew module and the crew escape system. The new crew module is under development. It is being tested. There is no capability in India to manufacture it. We have to get it from outside. That work is currently going on.

Personally, I don’t care that this element of the ‘Gaganyaan’ mission will be brought from abroad. It will be one of several thousand components of such provenance in the mission. The only thing that matters is we know how to do it: combine the ingredients using the right recipe and make it taste good. That we can’t locally make this or that ingredient is amply secondary. ‘Gaganyaan’ is not a mission to improve India’s manufacturing capabilities. It is a mission to send Indians to space using an Indian launch vehicle. This refers to the recipe, rather than the ingredient.

But indigeneity matters to a section of people who like to thump their chests because, to them, ‘Gaganyaan’ is about showing the world – or at least the West – that India is just as good as them, if not better. Their misplaced sentiments have spilled over into popular culture, where at least two mainstream movies and one TV show (all starring A-list actors) have made villains out of foreign spaceflight agencies or officials. Thinking like this is the reason a lack of complete indigeneity has become a problem. Otherwise, again, it is quite irrelevant, and sometimes even a distraction.

Somanath himself implies as much (almost as if he wishes to separate his comments on the Vedas, etc. from his thinking on ‘Gaganyaan’, etc.):

It depends on our confidence at that point of time… Only when we are very sure of ourselves, we will send human beings into space. Otherwise, we will not do that. In my opinion, it will take more time than we really thought of. We are not worried about it. What we are worried about is that we should do it right the first time. The schedule is secondary here. … Some claims I made last year are not important. I am focusing on capability development.

Featured image: The nose cone bearing the spacecraft of the Chandrayaan-3 mission ahead of being fit to the launch vehicle. Credit: ISRO.

Something more foolish than completing phase 3 trials in 1.5 months?

That the Union government and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had entered into a more intimate, but not necessarily more beneficial, relationship became evident in 2019 when then ISRO chairman K. Sivan trotted out a series of dubious claims to massage the fate of the Chandrayaan 2 mission, whose lunar surface component had obviously failed. Anyone who follows Indian spaceflight news is familiar with the adage ‘space is hard’ and all of them abide by it (there’s an argument that we shouldn’t extend the same courtesy to more mature space programmes). Yet Sivan was determined to salvage even more, going so far at one point to call the whole mission (orbiter + lander) a “98% success”.

Shortly after news of the lander’s fate became clear to ground control, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was present as the chief guest, consoled Sivan with his customary hug even as ISRO at large withdrew into a shell of silence, offering only the occasional scrap of what it knew had happened to the lander. The vacuum of information allowed a trickle of speculation, but which was soon overwhelmed by a swell of conspiracies and, as is inevitable these days, a virtual barrier erected by right-wing commentators and bots that suppressed all questions asking for more information in the public domain. This ISRO, and the attendant public experience of India’s spaceflight programme, was markedly different from the ISRO of before – a feeling that Sivan deepened with other claims about the amount of time ISRO would need to realise its ‘Gaganyaan’ human spaceflight mission, which has already been delayed by three years. Sivan had unknowingly underestimated the amount, had deliberately communicated a shorter duration, had communicated the actual time but to which government officials couldn’t agree, or something else happened. The first possibility would’ve been unlikely were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic – but then it would seem that even if Sivan’s successor, S. Somanath, were to push back and ask for more time, the government has made up its mind: New Indian Express reported on December 8 that ISRO had received “instructions from the government” to send Indian astronauts to space on its GSLV Mk III rocket before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections! This has to be the second most unintelligent decision the government has made in the limited context of large-scale undertakings involving science and the lives of people, after Balram Bhargava’s subsequently rescinded threat in mid-2020 for researchers to complete the Covaxin phase 3 clinical trial in time for Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day address less than two months away. It’s not clear if the government will rescind its demand of ISRO; the report itself is brief and doesn’t mention any resistance from the spaceflight mission team. But how this squares with minister Jitendra Singh’s statement in parliament last week, that the first crewed mission will only liftoff in late 2024 and that “crew safety is paramount”, is unclear. Assuming that the government will continue to push ISRO to launch in the first half of 2024, a flight based on a schedule modified to accommodate the demand may surpass the foolishness of Bhargava’s ask.

Every human spaceflight mission is inordinately complex. ISRO will have to design and test every component of the launch vehicle, crew capsule, mission profile, ground systems and crew management beforehand, in different conditions. It has to anticipate all possible failure scenarios and arrange for both failure-avoidance systems and failsafes. The timeline may have been more flexible in the early days of the undertaking, when the systems being tested were less composite, but not so today. When the government “instructs” ISRO to launch the ‘Gaganyaan’ crewed flight before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections (which are around 18 months away), it’s practically asking ISRO to devise a testing schedule that will be completed – irrespective of the tests’ outcomes – in this period all so it can use the mission’s outcomes (developed with government funds) as part of its election campaign. It’s effectively asking ISRO to sideline science, safety standards and good sense. Imagine one safety test going awry, and which ISRO might in other circumstances have liked to fix and redo. With “instructions” like those of the government, it won’t be able to – jeopardising the mission itself as well as the lives of the astronauts and the reputation of the Indian space programme in the international arena. The government simply shouldn’t make such a frighteningly asinine demand, and instead allow ISRO to take all the time it needs (within reasonable limits) to successfully complete its first human spaceflight mission.

ISRO has of late also embarked on programmes to increase its commercial revenue, even though it’s a “space research organisation”. If a crewed mission fails because the organisation let itself be cowed by the national government into trimming its testing process, all so a political party could use the launch as part of its poll propaganda, all of the organisation’s other rockets will confront doubts about their safety and whether they won’t threaten satellites worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A lot of ISRO’s work on ‘Gaganyaan’ has also happened to the exclusion of other launch vehicles and scientific missions, including (but not limited to) the reusable launch vehicle, the semi-cryogenic engine and the Aditya L1 space-probe. Its low rate of production of new rockets recently forced it to postpone the Chandrayaan 3 mission to accommodate the OneWeb satellites (in a commercial contract) in its launch manifest. Setting aside questions of ISRO’s relatively low funding and internal priorities, even if ‘Gaganyaan’ succeeds out of luck, the prospects of all of these adversely affected projects will suffer at least further reputational consequences. If ‘Gaganyaan’ fails, the future will be a lot worse.

Just as the Covaxin incident opened a window into how the Indian government was thinking about the COVID-19 vaccination drive and the role of science in shaping it, a demand of ISRO to launch realise its human spaceflight mission with a hard deadline opens a window into the Indian government’s considerations on ‘Gaganyaan’. The BJP government revived ISRO’s proposal for a human spaceflight mission in 2014, approved it in 2017 and allocated Rs 10,000 crore in 2018. Did it do so only because of how the mission’s success, should it come to pass, would help the party win elections? It’s desirable for a party’s goals and the country’s goals to be aligned – until the former crimps the latter. But more importantly, should we be concerned about the government’s heuristic for selecting and rejecting which spaceflight missions to fund? And should we be concerned about which publicly funded projects it will seek more accountability on?

There have been standing committee and audit reports calling ISRO out for slow work on this or that matter but the government at large, especially the incumbent one since 2019, has taken pains to maintain a front of amicability. It might be mildly amusing if a political party promises in its pre-poll manifesto to get ISRO in shape, and then in line, by readying a reusable launch vehicle for commercial missions by 2025 or launching five scientific missions in the next four years – but standing in the way of that is more than a knack to translate between public sentiment and technological achievement. It requires breaking a longstanding tradition of cosying up to ISRO as much as granting it autonomy while simultaneously underfunding it. We need the national government, most of all, to pay more attention to all ISRO projects on which there is evidence of dilly-dallying, and grapple honestly with the underlying issues, rather than poke its nose in the necessarily arduous safety-rating process of a crewed mission.

Featured image: A GSLV Mk III rocket lifts off on its first orbital flight, July 2017. Credit: ISRO.

What arguments against the ‘next LHC’ say about funding Big Physics

A few days ago, a physicist (and PhD holder) named Thomas Hartsfield published a strange article in Big Think about why building a $100-billion particle physics machine like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a bad idea. The article was so replete with errors things that even I – a not-physicist and not-a-PhD-holder – cringed reading them. I also wanted to blog about the piece but theoretical physicist Matthew Strassler beat me to it, with a straightforward post about the many ways in which Hartsfield’s article was just plain wrong, especially coming from a physicist. But I also think there were some things that Strassler either overlooked or left unsaid and which to my mind bear fleshing out – particularly points that have to do with the political economy of building research machines like the LHC. I also visit in the end the thing that really made me want to write this post, in response to a seemingly throwaway line in Strassler’s post. First, the problems that Hartsfield’s piece throws up and which deserve more attention:

1. One of Hartsfield’s bigger points in his article is that instead of spending $100 billion on one big physics project, we could spend it on 100,000 smaller projects. I agree with this view, sensu lato, that we need to involve more stakeholders than only physicists when contemplating the need for the next big accelerator or collider. However, in making the argument that the money can be redistributed, Hartsfield presumes that a) if a big publicly funded physics project is cancelled, the allocated money that the government doesn’t spend as a result will subsequently be diverted to other physics prohects, and b) this is all the money that we have to work with. Strassler provided the most famous example of the fallacy pertinent to (a): the Superconducting Super Collider in the US, whose eventually cancellation ‘freed’ an allocation of $4.4 billion, but the US government didn’t redirect this money back into other physics research grants. (b), on the other hand, is a more pernicious problem: a government allocating $100 billion for one project does not implicitly mean that it can’t spare $10 million for a different project, or projects. Realpolitik is important here. Politicians may contend that after having approved $100 billion for one project, it may not be politically favourable for them to return to Congress or Parliament or wherever with another proposal for $10 million. But on the flip side, both mega-projects and many physics research items are couched in arguments and aspirations to improve bilateral or multilateral ties (without vomiting on other prime ministers), ease geopolitical tensions, score or maintain research leadership, increase research output, generate opportunities for long-term technological spin-offs, spur local industries, etc. Put another way, a Big Science project is not just a science project; depending on the country, it could well be a national undertaking along the lines of the Apollo 11 mission. These arguments matter for political consensus – and axiomatically the research projects that are able to present these incentives are significantly different from those that aren’t, which in turn can help fund both Big Science and ‘Small Science’ projects at the same time. The possibility exists. For example, the Indian government has funded Gaganyaan separately from ISRO’s other activities. $100 billion isn’t all the money that’s available, and we should stop settling for such big numbers when they are presented to us.

2. These days, big machines like the one Hartsfield has erected as a “straw man” – to use Strassler words – aren’t built by individual countries. They are the product of an international collaboration, typically with dozens of governments, hundreds of universities and thousands of researchers participating. The funds allocated are also spent over many years, even decades. In this scenario, when a $100-billion particle collider is cancelled, no one entity in the whole world suddenly has that much money to give away at any given moment. Furthermore, in big collaborations, countries don’t just give money; often they add value by manufacturing various components, leasing existing facilities, sharing both human and material resources, providing loans, etc. The value of each of these contracts is added to the total value of the project. For example, India has been helping the LHC by manufacturing and supplying components related to the machine’s magnetic and cryogenic facilities. Let’s say India’s Departments of Science and Technology and of Atomic Energy had inked contracts with CERN, which hosts and maintains the LHC, worth $10 million to make and transport these components, but then the LHC had been called off just before its construction was to begin. Does this mean India would have had $10 million to give away to other science projects? Not at all! In fact, manufacturers within the country would have been bummed about losing the contracts.

3. Hartsfield doesn’t seem to acknowledge incremental results, results that improve the precision of prior measurements and results that narrow the range in which we can find a particle. Instead, he counts only singularly positive, and sensational, results – of which the LHC has had only one: the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. Take all of them together and the LHC will suddenly seem more productive. Simply put, precision-improving results are important because even a minute difference between the theoretically predicted value and the observed value could be a significant discovery that opens the door to ‘new physics’. We recently saw this with the mass of a subatomic particle called the W boson. Based on the data collected by a detector mounted on the Tevatron particle accelerator in Illinois, physicists found that the mass of the W boson differed from the predicted value by around 0.12%. This was sufficient to set off a tsunami of excitement and speculation in the particle physics community. (Hartsfield also overlooked an important fact and which Strassler caught: that the LHC collects a lot more data than physicists can process in a single year, which means that when the LHC winds down, physicists will still have many years of work left before they are done with the LHC altogether. This is evidently still happening with the Tevatron, which was shut down in 2011, so Hartsfield missing it is quite weird. Another thing that happened to Tevatron and is still happening with the LHC is that these machines are upgraded over time to produce better results.) Similarly, results that exclude the energy ranges in which a particle can be found are important because they tell us what kind of instruments we should build in future to detect the same particle. We obviously won’t need instruments that sweep the same energy range (nor will we have a guarantee that the particle will be found outside the excluded energy range – that’s a separate problem). There is another point to be made but which may not apply to CERN as much as to Big Science projects in other countries: one country’s research community building and operating a very large research facility signals to other countries that the researchers know what they’re doing and that they might be more deserving of future investments than other candidates with similar proposals. This is one of the things that India lost with the scuttling of the India-based Neutrino Observatory (the loss itself was deserved, to be sure).

Finally, the statement in Strassler’s post that piqued me the most:

My impression, from his writing and from what I can find online, is that most of what he knows about particle physics comes from reading people like Ethan Siegel and Sabine Hossenfelder. I think Dr. Hartsfield would have done better to leave the argument to them.

Thomas Hartsfield has clearly done a shoddy job in his article in the course of arguing against a Big Physics machine like LHC in the future, but his screwing up doesn’t mean discussions on the need for the next big collider should be left to physicists. I admit that Strassler’s point here was probably limited to the people whose articles and videos were apparently Hartsfield’s primary sources of information – but it also seemed to imply that instead of helping those who get things wrong do better next time, it’s okay to ask them to not try again and instead leave the communication efforts to their primary sources. That’s Ethan Siegel and Sabine Hossenfelder in this case – both prolific communicators – but in many instances, bad articles are written by writers who bothered to try while their sources weren’t doing more or better to communicate to the people at large. This is also why it bears repeating that when it comes to determining the need for a Big Physics project of the likes of the LHC, physics is decidedly one non-majority part of it and that – importantly – science communicators also have an equally vital role to play. Let me quote here from an article by physicist Nirmalya Kajuri, published in The Wire Science in February 2019:

… the few who communicate science can have a lopsided influence on the public perception of an entire field – even if they’re not from that field. The distinction between a particle physicist and, say, a condensed-matter physicist is not as meaningful to most people reading the New York Times or any other mainstream publication as it is to physicists. There’s no reason among readers to exclude [one physicist] as an expert.

However, very few physicists engage in science communication. The extreme ‘publish or perish’ culture that prevails in sciences means that spending time in any activity other than research carries a large risk. In some places, in fact, junior scientists spending time popularising science are frowned upon because they’re seen to be spending time on something unproductive.

…

All physicists agree that we can’t keep building colliders ad infinitum. They differ on when to quit. Now would be a good time, according to Hossenfelder. Most particle physicists don’t think so. But how will we know when we’ve reached that point? What are the objective parameters here? These are complex questions, and the final call will be made by our ultimate sponsors: the people.

So it’s a good thing that this debate is playing out before the public eye. In the days to come, physicists and non-physicists must continue this dialogue and find mutually agreeable answers. Extensive, honest science communication will be key.

So more physicists should join in the fray, as should science journalists, writers, bloggers and communicators in general. Just that they should also do better than Thomas Hartsfield to get the details right.

A meeting with the PSA’s office

The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) organised a meeting with science communicators from around India on January 27, in New Delhi. Some of my notes from the meeting are displayed below, published with three caveats.

First, my notes are not to be treated as the minutes of the meeting; I only jotted down what I personally found interesting. Some 75% of the words in there are part of suggestions and recommendations advanced by different people; the remainder are, broadly, observations. They appear in no discernible order not because I jumbled them up but because participants offered both kinds of statements throughout. The meeting itself lasted for seven or so hours (including breaks for lunch and tea), so every single statement was also accompanied by extensive discussion. Finally, I have temporarily withheld some portions because I plan to discuss them in additional blog posts.

Second, the meeting followed the Chatham House Rules, which means I am not at liberty to attribute statements uttered during the course of the meeting to their human originators. I have also not identified my own words where possible not because I want to hide but because, by virtue of these ideas appearing on my blog, I take full responsibility (but not authorship) for their publicisation.

Third, though the meeting was organised by the Office of the PSA, its members were not the only ones of the government present at the meeting. Representatives of some other government-affiliated bodies were also in attendance. So statements obviously uttered by a government official – if any do come across that way – are not necessarily attributable to members of the Office of the PSA.

“We invest a lot in science, we don’t use it imaginatively enough.”

Three major science related issues:

  1. Climate change
  2. Dramatic consequences of our growth on biodiversity
  3. B/c of these two, how one issues addresses sustainable development
  • Different roles for journalists within and without the government
  • Meeting is about what each one of us can do — but what is that?
  • Each one of us can say “I could do better if only you could better empathise with what I do”
  • Need for skill-sharing events for science journalists/communicators
  • CSIR’s National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources has a centre for science and media relations, and a national science library
  • Indian Council of Medical Research has a science communication policy but all press releases need to be okayed by health minister!
  • Knowledge making is wrapped up in identity
  • Regional language communicators don’t have access to press releases, etc. in regional languages, nor access to translators
  • Department of Science and Technology and IIT Kanpur working on machine-translations of scientific content of Wikipedia
  • Netherlands Science Foundation published a book compiling public responses to question ‘what do you think of science?’
  • In the process of teaching kids science, you can also get them to perform science and use the data (e.g. mapping nematode density in soil using Foldscope)
  • Slack group for science communicators, channels divided by topic
  • Leaders of scientific bodies need to be trained on how to deal with journalists, how to respond in interviews, etc.
  • Indian Space Research Organisation, Defence R&D Organisation and Department of Atomic Energy need to not be so shut off! What are they hiding? If nothing to hide, why aren’t they reachable?
  • Need structural reforms for institutional research outreach — can’t bank on skills, initiative of individual science communicators at institutes to ensure effective outreach
  • Need to decentralise PR efforts at institutions
  • People trained in science communication need to find jobs/employment
  • Pieces shortlisted for AWSAR award could be put on a CC BY-ND license so news publications can republish them en masse without edits
  • Please hold meetings like this at periodic intervals, let this not be a one-time thing
  • Issues with covering science: Lack of investment, few people covering science, not enough training opportunities, not enough science communication research in India
  • Need local meet-ups between journalists and scientists to get to know each other, facilitated by the government
  • Outreachers needn’t have to be highly regarded scientists, even grad students can give talks — and kids will come to listen
  • Twitter is an elite platform — science communicators that need to stay in touch need to do more; most science communicators don’t know each other!
  • Can we host one edition of the World Conference of Science Journalists in India?
  • What happened to the Indian Science Writers’ Association?
  • Today the mind is not without fear! The political climate is dire, people can’t freely speak their minds without fear of reprisal — only obvious that this should affect science journalism also
  • ISRO is a darling of the media, the government and the masses but has shit outreach! Rs 10,000 crore being spent on Gaganyaan but the amount of info on it in the public domain is poop.
  • CSIR’s Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology is very open and accessible, director needs to be kept in the loop about some press interaction but that’s it; perhaps the same template can be recreated in other institutes?
  • Outreach at scientific institutions is a matter of trust: if director doesn’t trust scientists to speak up without permission, and if PR people don’t respond to emails or phone calls, impression is that there is no trust within the institute as well as that the institute would like journalists to not be curious
  • People trained in science communication (informally also) need a place to practice their newfound skills.
  • Private sector industry is in the blindspot of journalists
  • People can more easily relate to lived experiences; aesthetically pleasing (beautiful-looking) stories are important
  • Most people have not had access to the tools of science, we need to build more affordable and accessible tools
  • Don’t attribute to malfeasance what can be attributed to not paying attention, incompetence, etc.
  • Journalistic deep-dives are good but lack of resources to undertake, not many publications do it either, except maybe The Wire and Caravan; can science communicators and the government set up a longform mag together?
  • Create a national mentorship network where contact details of ‘mentors’ are shared and mentees enrolled in the programme can ask them questions, seek guidance, etc.
  • Consider setting up a ‘science media centre’ — but can existing and functional models in Australia and the UK be ported to India without facing any issues?
  • Entities like IndiaBioscience could handle biology research outreach for scientific institutes in, say, the South India region or Bangalore region with some support from the government. That would be better than an SMC-from-scratch.
  • Consider including science communication in government’s new draft Scientific Social Responsibility policy and other S&T innovation policies
  • Allocate a fixed portion of funding for research for public outreach and communication (such as 2%)
  • Need more formal recognition for science communication researchers within scientific institutions; members currently stuck in a limbo between outreach office and scientists, makes it difficult to acquire funds for work
  • Support individual citizen science initiatives
  • Need better distinction between outreach groups and press offices — we don’t have a good press office anywhere in the country! Press officers encourage journalistic activity, don’t just promote institute’s virtues but look out for the institute as situated in the country’s overall science and society landscape
  • Any plans to undertake similar deliberations on philosophy of science (including culture of research, ethics and moral responsibilities)?
  • Scientific institutions could consider hosting journalists for one day a month to get to know each other
  • What’s in it for the scientist to speak to a journalist about their work? Need stronger incentives — journalists can provide some of that by establishing trust with the scientist, but can journalists alone provide incentives? Is it even their responsibility?
  • Consider conducting a ‘scientific temper survey’ to understand science literacy as well as people’s perceptions of science — could help government formulate better policies, and communicators and journalists to better understand what exactly their challenges are
  • Need to formulate specific guidelines for science communication units at scientific research institutions as well as for funding agencies
  • Set up fellowships and grants for science communicators, but the government needs to think about attaching as few strings as possible to such assistance
  • Need for more government support for regional and local newspapers vis-à-vis covering science, especially local science
  • Need to use multimedia – especially short videos, podcasts illustrations and other aids – to communicate science instead of sticking to writing; visuals in particular could help surmount language barrier right away

The mission that was 110% successful

Caution: Satire.

On October 2, Kailash S., the chairman of the Indian Wonderful Research Organisation (IWRO), announced that the Moonyaan mission had become a 110% success. At an impromptu press conference organised inside the offices of India Day Before Yesterday, he said that the orbiter was performing exceptionally well and that a focus on its secondary scientific mission could only diminish the technological achievement that it represented.

Shortly after the lander, carrying a rover plus other scientific instruments, crashed on the Moon’s surface two weeks ago, Kailash had called the mission a “90-95% success”. One day after it became clear Moonyaan’s surface mission had ended for good and well after IWRO had added that the orbiter was on track to be operational for over five years, Kailash revised his assessment to 98%.

On the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti, Kailash upgraded his score because despite the lander’s failure to touchdown, it had been able to descend from an altitude of 120 km to 2.1 km before a supposed thruster anomaly caused it to plummet instead of brake. “We have been analysing the mission in different ways and we have found that including this partially successful descent in our calculations provides a more accurate picture of Moonyaan’s achievement,” Kailash said to journalists.

When a member of a foreign publication prodded him saying that space doesn’t exactly reward nearness, Kailash replied, “I dedicate this mission to the Swachh Bharat mission, which has successfully ended open defecation in India today.” At this moment, Prime Minister A. Modern Nadir, who was sitting in front of him, turned around and hugged Kailash.

When another journalist, from BopIndia, had a follow-up question about whether the scientific mission of Moonyaan was relevant at all, Kailash responded that given the givens, the payloads onboard the orbiter had a responsibility to “work properly” or “otherwise they could harm the mission’s success and bring its success rate down to the anti-national neighbourhood of 100%”.

On all three occasions – September 7, September 22 and October 2 – India became the first country in the world as well as in history to achieve the success rates that it did in such a short span of time, in the context of a lunar mission. Thus, mission operators have their fingers crossed that the instruments won’t embarrass what has thus far been a historical technological performance with a corresponding scientific performance with returns of less than 110%.

Finally, while Moonyaan has elevated his profile, Kailash revealed his plan to take it even higher when he said the Heavenyaan mission would be good to go in the next 30 months. Heavenyaan is set to be India’s first human spaceflight programme and will aim to launch three astronauts to low-Earth orbit, have them spend a few days there, conducting small experiments, and return safely to Earth in a crew capsule first tested in 2014.

IWRO has already said it will test semi-cryogenic engines – to increase the payload capacity of its largest rocket so it can launch the crew capsule into space – it purchased from an eastern European nation this year. Considering all other components are nearly ready, including the astronauts who have managed with the nation’s help to become fully functioning adults, Heavenyaan is already 75% successful. Only 35% remains, Kailash said.

In financial terms, Heavenyaan is more than 10-times bigger than Moonyaan. Considering there has been some speculation that the latter’s lander couldn’t complete its descent because mission operators hadn’t undertaken sufficiently elaborate tests on Earth that could have anticipated the problem, observers have raised concerns about whether IWRO will skip tests and cut corners for Heavenyaan as well as for future interplanetary missions.

When alerted to these misgivings, Nadir snatched the mic and said, “What is testing? I will tell you. Testing is ‘T.E.S.T.’. ‘T’ stands for ‘thorough’. ‘E’ for ‘effort’. ‘S’ for ‘sans’. ‘T’ for ‘testing’. So what is ‘test’? It is ‘thorough effort sans testing’. It means that when you are building the satellite, you do it to the best of your ability without thinking about the results. Whatever will happen will happen. This is from the Bhagavad Gita. When you build your satellite to the best of your ability, why should you waste money on testing? We don’t have to spend money like NASA.”

Nadir’s quip was met with cheers in the hall. At this point, the presser concluded and the journalists were sent away to have tea and pakodas*.

*Idea for pakodas courtesy @pradx.

Why are we going to the Moon again?

At 2:51 am on July 15, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will launch its Chandrayaan 2 mission on board a GSLV Mk III rocket from its spaceport in Sriharikota. The rocket will place its payload, the orbiter, in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth. Over the next 16 days, the orbiter will raise its orbit in five steps by firing its thrusters. After that, it will perform an injection burn and travel Moonward for about a week, before entering into an elliptical orbit there. Then the orbiter will lower its altitude in multiple steps and then deploy a lander named Vikram.

The lander will descend over the lunar surface and touch down on September 6 or 7 this year. Once ISRO scientists have performed basic health checks to see if everything is okay, Vikram will release a rover named Pragyan onto the lunar soil.

This will be the exciting start of Chandrayaan 2, India’s most ambitious space mission to date. Pragyan will spend two weeks on the Moon collecting scientific data about different characteristics of the natural satellite, after which its batteries will die.

If Chandrayaan 2 is successful, it will have placed the first Indian rover on the Moon’s surface. The mission will also signal India’s first big stride towards the Moon, paralleling that of other countries around the world eyeing the body as a stepping stone to deeper journeys into space.

The US, Europe and China all envision the Moon as a pit-stop between Earth and Mars, and hope to build permanent stations on the body. Indian officials have expressed similar hopes.

Such missions are bound to be extremely sophisticated, and extremely expensive.  Chandrayaan 2 alone cost India Rs 978 crore, and the upcoming human spaceflight mission Rs 10,000 crore. These costs are unavoidable – but they could be reduced by focusing on robotic missions instead of human ones. For example, Russia plans to have a Moon base by 2030 whose primary agents will be robots, with some humans to help them.

Chandrayaan 2 is India’s most complex robotic mission till date. At a recent press conference, K. Sivan, the ISRO chairman, acknowledged contributions from industry and academia to the tune of incurring 67% of the total cost. Given such resources are the bare minimum required to make an interplanetary journey work, the first countries to undertake these trips will also be some of the world’s richest countries – or groups of countries that have decided to work together with space exploration as a common goal.

ISRO could consider regularly reserving a few payload slots for instruments from countries that don’t have space programmes on missions to accrue diplomatic advantages as an extension of its ongoing efforts. That way, we can symbolically take more countries to the Moon and Mars. A South or Southeast Asian Moon mission, if it ever happens, could have significant R&D benefits for India’s scientists and engineers, even ease the financial burden on ISRO and perhaps edge out behemoths like China.

According to Sivan, Chandrayaan 2 will have a payload of 14 instruments: eight on the orbiter, three on the lander and two on the rover. Thirteen of them will be India’s, and one from NASA (a passive retroreflector).

At the moment, going to space has two purposes: research and development. Research precedes development, but development triggers the race. Scientists have built and launched satellites to understand the Solar System in great detail. But if someone is rushing to go to the Moon or Mars in the name of exploiting resources there to benefit humankind, it is because someone else is also doing the same thing.

It’s understandable that nobody wants to be left out, but it’s equally important to have something to do when we get to the Moon or Mars besides winning a race. Right now, Chandrayaan 2 is being billed as a research mission but a similar purpose is missing from ISRO’s messaging on Gaganyaan. As Arup Dasgupta, former deputy director of the ISRO Space Applications Centre, asked: “What do we hope to achieve after we have waved the Indian flag from orbit?”

In fact, it is not clear what will happen after Chandrayaan 2 either. ISRO officials have said that the organisation plans to build its own space station and also hinted that it might send Indians to the Moon someday. But we don’t know what these people will do there or if it also plans to send astronauts to Mars. Even the Moon seems desirable now only because it appears to be in speculative demand.

Most of all, we don’t know how all of these plans fit together to make up India’s spaceflight ambitions for the 21st century. We need a unified vision because these missions are resource-intensive, and won’t be worth the money and effort unless there is a longer-term version to help decide what our priorities should be to maximise resource utilisation. It will also allow us to be opportunistic (like Luxembourg) and regain the first-mover advantage instead of staying also-rans.

For example, ISRO also needs its allocation to build, launch and operate Earth-observation, resource-monitoring, communication, navigation and scientific satellites, to build and launch different kinds of rockets for the launch services market, to develop new spaceports and to design and build components for future missions.

If we wish more bang for the buck, then each launch must carry the best instruments we can make, backed by the best infrastructure we can set up to use the data from the instruments, and feed the best channels to use knowledge derived from that data to improve existing services. There are multiple opportunities for improvement on all of these fronts.

Further, a space or interplanetary mission isn’t just for scientists, engineers or businesspeople. In a not-so-drastic break with tradition, ISRO could for example index and organise all the data obtained from the 13 Indian instruments onboard Chandrayaan 2 and place them in the public domain to benefit teachers, students and other enthusiasts. It could incentivise ISRO to improve its data analysis and translational research pipelines, both of which are clogged at the moment.

There’s no greater example of this than the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) and NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN), which were launched at almost the same time in 2014. While we hailed MOM for its shoestring budget, MAVEN has contributed to a larger volume of scientific data and knowledge, almost as if just getting there wasn’t exactly enough.

For now, we are all excited about Chandrayaan 2, and rightly so. The ISRO viewing gallery in Sriharikota will be packed with visitors on the night of July 14, the news media will be abuzz with live updates from July 15 onwards, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will likely be following it as well. The organisation’s public outreach cell has also awakened from its famous slumber to post a flurry of updates on its website, social media and YouTube.

But there will always be exciting missions coming up. After Chandrayaan 2, there is Aditya L1, Gaganyaan, a second Mars mission, a Venus orbiter, reusable launch vehicles, the small-satellite launch vehicle, heavy-lift launchers, etc., plus the ‘Space Theme Park’. None of these should distract us from whatever it is that we’re aiming for, and right now, that isn’t clear beyond an aspiration to stay in the picture.

The Wire
July 4, 2019

Solutions looking for problems

There’s been a glut of ‘science projects’ that seem to be divorced from their non-technical aspects even when the latter are equally, if not more, important – or maybe it is just a case of these problems always having been around but this author not being able to unsee it these days.

An example that readily springs to mind is the Bharati intermediary script, developed by a team at IIT Madras to ease digitisation of Indian language texts. There is just one problem: why invent a whole new script when Latin already exists and is widely understood, by humans as well as machines? Perhaps the team would have been spared its efforts if it had consulted with an anthropologist.

Another example, also from IIT Madras: it just issued a press release announcing that a team from the institute that is the sole Asian finalist in a competition to build a ‘pod’ for Elon Musk’s Hyperloop transportation concept has unveiled its design. On the flip side, Hyperloop is a high-tech, high-cost solution to a problem that trains and buses were designed to address decades ago, and they remain more efficient and more feasible. Elon Musk has admitted he conceived Hyperloop because he doesn’t like mass transit; perhaps more reliably, his simultaneous bashing of high-speed rail hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Here is a third example, this one worth many crores: the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) wants to build a space station and staff it with its astronauts. The problem is nobody is sure what the need is, maybe not even ISRO, although it has been characteristically tight-lipped. There certainly doesn’t seem to be a rationale beyond “we want to see if we can do it”. If indeed Indian scientists want to conduct microgravity experiments of their own, like what are being undertaken on the International Space Station (ISS) today and will be on the Chinese Space Station (CSS) in the near future, that is okay. But where are the details and where is the justification for not simply investing in the ISS or the CSS?

It is very difficult to negotiate a fog without feeling like something is wrong. We built and launched AstroSat because Indian astronomers needed a space telescope they could access for their studies. We will be launching Aditya in 2020 because Indian astrophysicists have questions about the Sun they would like answered. But even then, let us remember that a (relatively) small space telescope is too lightweight an exercise compared to a full-fledged space station that could cost ISRO more money than it is currently allocated every year.

Sivan’s announcements are also of a piece with those of his predecessors. In fact, the organisation as such has announced many science missions without finalising the instruments they are going to carry. In early 2017, it publicised an ‘announcement of opportunity’ for a mission to Venus next decade and invited scientists to submit pitches for instruments – instead of doing it the other way around. While this is entirely understandable with a space programme that is limited in its choice of launchers, this pattern has also prompted doubts that ISRO is simply inventing reasons to fly certain missions.

Additionally, since Sivan has pitched the Indian Space Station as an “extension” of ISRO’s human spaceflight programme, we must not forget that the human spaceflight programme itself lacks vision. As Arup Dasgupta, former dy. director of the ISRO Space Applications Centre, wrote for The Wire in March this year:

… while ISRO has been making and flying science satellites, … our excursions to the Moon, then Mars and now Gaganyaan appear to break from ISRO’s 1969 vision. This is certainly not a problem because, in the last half century, there have been significant advances in space applications for development, and ISRO needs new goals. However, these goals have to be unique and should put ISRO in a lead position – the way its use of space applications for development did. Given the frugal approach that ISRO follows, Chandrayaan I and the Mars Orbiter Mission did put ISRO ahead of its peers on the technology front, but what of their contribution to science? Most space scientists are cagey, and go off the record, when asked about what we learnt that we can now share with others and claim pride of place in planetary exploration.

So is ISRO fond of these ideas only because it seems to want to show the world that it can, without any thought for what the country can accrue beyond the awe of others? And when populism rules the parliamentary roost – whether under the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Indian National Congress – ISRO isn’t likely to face pushback from the government either.

Ultimately, when you spend something like Rs 10,000-20,000 crore over two decades to make something happen, it is going to be very easy to feel like something was achieved at the end of that time, if only because it is psychologically painful to have to admit that we could get such a big punt wrong. In effect, preparing for ex post facto rationalisation before the fact itself should ring alarm bells.

Supporters of the idea will tell you today that it will help industry grow, that it will expose Indian students to grand technologies, that it will employ many thousands of people. They will need to be reminded that while these are the responsibilities of a national government, they are not why the space programme exists. And that even if the space programme provided all these opportunities, it will have failed without justifying why doing all this required going to space.