Augest.31 : Chandrayaan-I is dead. However, scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation, whose big budgets are beyond the usual audit umbrella and whose projects remain way above the comprehension of most people, including the babus who run the Indian administration, insist that the moon mission itself is alive and kicking. And that Chandrayaan-II will take off as planned around 2011-12 along with a lander-rover, which is quite similar to the lunar vehicles used by America’s Apollo missions before Neil Armstrong became the first man to land on the moon over 40 years ago. C-II will use its rover to pick up the moonstones for on-site analysis of the lunar surface and transmit the data to its earth station, the Indian Deep Space Network (ISDN), at Byalalu village near Bengaluru. It will not come back, but C-III — scheduled around 2015 — will return with samples of the lunar surface.
Independent of these Chandrayaan missions will be the manned trips into space. The first manned mission will orbit the earth five or six times before returning for a sea-splash sometime in 2015 or a year later. The training of astronauts will soon begin in Bengaluru, and if all goes well India’s maiden manned moon trip will take place in 2020. If all these claims are meant to combat the gloom in Isro after it lost Chandrayaan-I 14 months early, against its projected two-year life around the moon, it must also be remembered that India is the only country which has performed the hugely complicated manoeuvring of the spacecraft from earth orbit to lunar orbit in the first attempt itself. The Russians had lost a few spaceships in this most critical operation. Another significant gain is that C-I, before its premature demise, managed to map most of the hitherto unvisited polar part, commonly known as the dark side of the moon. The data it sent to Byalalu will greatly help the Indian exploration for water on the moon. Just the other day, Isro announced it had teamed up with Nasa to study possibilities of lunar water in this patch of the moon.
The most common question that pops up whenever a space mission fails is whether the nation was right to spend all those millions on "over-ambitious" adventures and if these had any relevance, specially when contrasted with the acute poverty still prevalent in India. Isro’s scientists have repeatedly spelt out how their work benefits the ordinary India in a variety of ways — forecasting weather for the farmer, spotting marine fishing zones and other natural resources, tele-medicine facilities for rural people, forest management, distance education and, of course, the revolution in telecommunications. The Internet, now such an integral part of our daily lives, and increasingly even in remoter areas, had its genesis in the US Apollo missions of the 1960s, when the American space programme for the first time used computer-aided data transfer and communication across the skies.
Having said all this, one cannot avoid a word or two of caution. The scientific community must introspect deeply on the reasons behind C-I’s death, so that valuable lessons are learnt on how to make future missions not only less vulnerable but also more productive. True, India’s space odysseys have been far cheaper than those undertaken by other countries, but that’s no reason to get complacent. While India can legitimately take pride that its space programme is zooming at par with those of other space nations, we must never lose sight of the fact that India is also the poorest among these countries. The ongoing debate among our nuclear and defence scientists on whether Pokhran-II in May 1998 was a success or failure only goes to show how our wider scientific community has remained a mystery, at times even unto itself.
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