Tag: human spaceflight

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.

Why we need *some* borders between us

Borders are often a bad thing because they create separation that is unconducive for what are generally considered to be socially desirable outcomes. And they’re often instituted to maximise political outcomes, especially of the electoral variety. However, as electoral politics – and the decisions politicians make leading up to elections – become increasingly divisive, the people’s perception of politics, especially among those belonging to the middle classes, simultaneously becomes more cynical. At one point, those engaged in less political activities could even begin to see politics as a meaningless enterprise engaged solely in furthering the interests of the powerful.

This is a wholly justified conclusion given the circumstances but it’s also saddening since this cynicism is almost always paid for by writing off all political endeavours, and all the borders they maintain – and it is even more saddening now, in this time of protests, riots, apathy and deaths among the poor of hunger, of all things. This particular point is worth highlighting more now because space, especially human spaceflight, is in the news. Elon Musk’s SpaceX recently launched two astronauts to the International Space Station in history’s first crewed mission by a non-governmental company (that still subsists mostly on government funds).

For many decades, creators, engineers and officials alike have billed space as an escape, particularly in two ways. First, as a material volume of the universe that humanity is yet to occupy in any meaningful way, space is a frontier – a place other than Earth where there are some opportunities to survive but more importantly which could present a fresh start, a new way to do things that apparently benefits from millennia of civilisation on Earth that has only left us with great inequality and prejudice. Second, as a vast emptiness composed of literally nothing for billions of kilometres at a time, space imposes a ‘loneliness tax’ on Earth that – as many spaceflight entrepreneurs are fond of saying – should prompt us to remember that “we’re all in this together”.

However, the problem with both perspectives is that they gloss over borders, and when some borders disappear, our awareness of inequality disappears while inequality itself doesn’t. A common refrain aspiring spacefarers like to pitch is of the view of Earth from the Moon, accompanied by a gruff but nonetheless well-intentioned reminder that borders are of our own making, and that if we got rid of them and worked in humanity’s best-interests as a whole, we’d be able to achieve great things.

I call bullshit because without borders to constantly remind ourselves that invisible lines exist in the ground as well as in our minds that a Dalit or a black person can’t cross, no Dalit or black person – or even many women for that matter – can enter the spaceflight programme, leave alone get to the Moon.

More broadly, what many of those engaged in less-political work see as “unnecessary borders” are really discomfiting borders, a fact that became immutably apparent during India’s #MeToo uprising on Twitter in October-November 2018. Then, the mass of allegations and complaints pouring in every day indicated, among other things, that when inequality and discrimination have become ubiquitous, affording men and women equal opportunities by way of redressal can’t make the inequality and discrimination go away. Instead, women, and indeed all underprivileged groups, need affirmative action: to give more women, more Dalits, more black people, more transgender people, etc. access to more opportunities for a time until both the previously privileged groups and the newly privileged groups are on equal footing. It’s only then that they can really become equals.

A popular argument against this course of action has been that it will only create a new asymmetry instead of eradicating the old one. No; it’s important to recognise that we don’t need to eradicate privileges by eradicating opportunities, but to render privileges meaningless by ensuring all people have equal access to every new opportunity that we develop.

Another contention, though it doesn’t dress like a contention, is that we should also discuss why it’s important to have people of diverse identities around the table. But to me, this view is awfully close to the expectation of people from underprivileged groups to justify themselves, often more than those from privileged groups ever have for the same or equal positions. Instead, to quote Tarun Menon, of the National Institute for Advanced Studies, Bengaluru: “Deliberative democracy” – “a form of democracy in which deliberation is central to decision-making” (source) – “is key to any well-ordered democratic society, both because it helps ensure that a variety of concerns are taken into account in democratic decision-making, and because it grants legitimacy to decision-making by making it participatory.”

This is why borders are important – to define groups that need to be elevated, so to speak; without them, our economic and political structures will continue to benefit who they always have. And this is also why borders not used to achieve socially desirable outcomes are nothing but divides.

More importantly from the spaceflight bros’ point of view, when the borders we do need are erased, space will mostly be filled with white men, and a proportionately fewer number of people of other racial, ethnic, gender and caste identities – if at all.

Featured image: Daria Shevtsova/Pexels.

Sci-fi past the science

There’s an interesting remark in the introductory portion of this article by Zeynep Tufekci (emphasis added):

At its best, though, science fiction is a brilliant vehicle for exploring not the far future or the scientifically implausible but the interactions among science, technology and society. The what-if scenarios it poses can allow us to understand our own societies better, and sometimes that’s best done by dispensing with scientific plausibility.

Given the context, such plausibility is likely predicated on the set of all pieces of knowledge minus the set of the unknown-unknown. This in turn indicates a significant divergence between scientific knowledge and knowledge of human society, philosophies and culture as we progress into the future, at least to the extent that there is a belief in the present that scientific knowledge already trails our knowledge of the sociological and political components required to build a more equitable society.

This is pithy and non-trivial at the same time: pithy because the statement reaffirms the truism that science in and of itself lacks the moral centrifuge to separate good from bad, and non-trivial because it refutes the technoptimism that guides Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, (the late) Paul Allen, etc.

If you superimposed this condition on sci-fi the genre, it becomes clear that Isaac Asimov’s and Arthur Clarke’s works – which the world’s tech billionaires claim to have been inspired by in their pursuit of interplanetary human spaceflight, as Tufekci writes – were less about strengthening the role of science and technology in our lives and more about rendering it transparent, so we can look past the gadgets and the gadgetry towards the social structures they’re embedded in.

In effect, Tufekci continues:

Science fiction is sometimes denigrated as escapist literature, but the best examples of it are exactly the opposite.

She argues in her short article, more of a long note, that this alternative reading of sci-fi and its purpose could encourage the billionaires to retool their ambitions and think about making life better on Earth. Food for thought, especially at the start of a new decade when there seems to be a blanket lien to hope – although I very much doubt the aspirations of Musk, Bezos and others were nurtured about such a simple fulcrum.

The ‘could’ve, should’ve, would’ve’ of R&D

ISRO’s Moon rover, which will move around the lunar surface come September (if all goes well), will live and and die in a span of 14 days because that’s how long the lithium-ion cells it’s equipped with can survive the -160º C-nights at the Moon’s south pole, among other reasons. This here illustrates an easily understood connection between fundamental research and its apparent uselessness on the one hand and applied science and its apparent superiority on the other.

Neither position is entirely and absolutely correct, of course, but this hierarchy of priorities is very real, at least in India, because it closely parallels the practices of the populist politics that privileges short-term gains over benefits in the longer run.

In this scenario, it may not seem worthwhile to fund a solid-state physicist who has, based on detailed physicochemical analyses, fashioned for example a new carbon-based material that can store lithium ions in its atomic lattice and has better thermal characteristics than graphite. It may seem even less worthwhile to fund researchers probing the seemingly obscure electronic properties of materials like graphene and silicene, writing papers steeped in abstract math and unable to propose a single viable application for the near-future.

But give it twenty years and a measure of success in the otherwise-unpredictable translational research part of the R&D pipeline, and suddenly, you’re holding the batteries that’re supposed to be installed on a Moon rover and need to determine how many instruments you can pack on there to ensure the whole ensemble is powered for the whole time they’ll need to conduct each of their tests. Just as suddenly, you’re also thinking about what else you could’ve installed on the little machine so it could’ve lived longer, and what else it could’ve potentially discovered in this bonus time.

Maybe you’re just happy, knowing how things have been for research in the country in the last two decades and based on the spaceflight organisation’s goals (a part of which the government has a say in), that the batteries can even last for two weeks. Maybe you’re just sad because you think it could’ve been better. But one way or another, it’s an inescapably tangible reminder that investments in research determine what you’re going to get to take out of the technology in the future. Put differently: it’s ridiculous to expect to know which water molecules are going to end up in which plant, but unless you water the soil, the plants are going to start wilting.

Chandrayaan 2 itself may be lined up to be a great success but who knows, there could come along a future mission where a groundbreaking instrument developed by an inspired student at a state university has to be left out of an interplanetary satellite because we didn’t have access to the right low-density, high-strength materials. Or where a bunch of Indians are on a decade-long interstellar voyage and the captain realises crew morale is dangerously low because the government couldn’t give two whits about social psychology.

The Planetary Society says humans orbiting Mars is important before they land on it

On Thursday night (IST), the Planetary Society announced the results of a workshop it hosted earlier this week to re-engage with the future of human spaceflight. The advocacy group concluded that humans orbiting Mars was a crucial step before humans could land on Mars.

The workshop, called “Humans Orbiting Mars”, was held with officials from the aerospace industry, scientific community and NASA in attendance. They addressed the question of whether human spaceflight to Mars by 2033 was feasible if NASA’s budget increased only by 2-3% between now and then (to keep up with inflation), and assuming the agency’s contribution to the International Space Station would end by 2024. The answer was ‘Yes’ conditional to the orbit-first-land-next strategy.

Some results from the workshop were made public by Scott Hubbard, former director of the NASA Ames Research Center, and John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, in a presser. The Society’s president and popular science communicator Bill Nye also presented some tidbits, but none of them were forthcoming about the precise details of the Society’s strategy.

Hubbard said that having humans orbit Mars first before landing was important to break “this very challenging effort into smaller, more executable pieces”, differentiating it from some private sector approaches to the red planet that Logsdon said “exist but don’t seem credible”. They admitted they were conscious of the strategy’s parallels to the Apollo 8 mission, which invigorated public interest in space exploration by carrying the first humans into an orbit around the moon in 1968 and giving humanity its first view of Earthrise.

A notional timeline for the 2033 mission was presented also, with crewed test-flights in cislunar orbits being planned for 2025 and 2027. Mars missions are fixed to launch windows every 26 months to coincide with the planet’s opposition, when it comes closest to Earth. However, the launch window in 2033 provides a suitable focus year also because NASA hopes to have tested the necessary spaceflight technologies and experience through its Asteroid Retrieval Mission in the 2020s.

The Society’s space-policy writer Casey Dreier concluded on his blog:

Over the next few months, we will work to publish as much of the content presented at the workshop as we can. And later this year, we will release a report based on the discussions and feedback from this meeting formalizing our thoughts and ideas on this path forward.

However, the presser only left reporters with more questions than answers. It may have been wiser to announce all the results of the workshop alongside the report instead of releasing vague details now, even if it appears the Planetary Society has a detailed architecture of the concept in place.

And – as if to have the Society reconsider its barb about infeasible private missions to Mars – the report’s release later this year could coincide with SpaceX’s much-awaited announcement of the details of its Mars Colonial Transporter, a transport vehicle that CEO-CTO Elon Musk has promised will be very different from the Dragon and Falcon 9 rockets it currently operates. Musk is also expected to announce new spacesuit designs meeting utility requirements by the end of 2015.

Featured image credit: NASA