Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: Gaganyaan

  • Watch the celebrations, on mute

    Right now, Shubhanshu Shukla is on his way back to Earth from the International Space Station. Am I proud he’s been the first Indian up there? I don’t know. It’s not clear.

    The whole thing seemed to be stage-managed. Shukla didn’t say anything surprising, nothing that popped. In fact he said exactly what we expected him to say. Nothing more, nothing less.

    Fuck controversy. It’s possible to be interesting in new ways all the time without edging into the objectionable. It’s not hard to beat predictability — but there it was for two weeks straight. I wonder if Shukla was fed all his lines. It could’ve been a monumental thing but it feels… droll.

    “India’s short on cash.” “India’s short on skills.” “India’s short on liberties.” We’ve heard these refrains as we’ve covered science and space journalism. But it’s been clear for some time now that “India’s short on cash” is a myth.

    We’ve written and spoken over and over that Gaganyaan needs better accountability and more proactive communication from ISRO’s Human Space Flight Centre. But it’s also true that it needs even more money than the Rs 20,000 crore it’s already been allocated.

    One thing I’ve learnt about the Narendra Modi government is that if it puts its mind to it, if it believes it can extract political mileage from a particular commitment, it will find a way to go all in. So when it doesn’t, the fact that it doesn’t sticks out. It’s a signal that The Thing isn’t a priority.

    Looking at the Indian space programme through the same lens can be revealing. Shukla’s whole trip and back was carefully choreographed. There’s been no sense of adventure. Grit is nowhere to be seen.

    But between Prime Minister Modi announcing his name in the list of four astronaut-candidates for Gaganyaan’s first crewed flight (currently set for 2027) and today, I know marginally more about Shukla, much less about the other three, and nothing really personal to boot. Just banal stuff.

    This isn’t some military campaign we’re talking about, is it? Just checking.

    Chethan Kumar at ToI and Jatan Mehta have done everyone a favour: one by reporting extensively on Shukla’s and ISRO’s activities and the other by collecting even the most deeply buried scraps of information from across the internet in one place. The point, however, is that it shouldn’t have come to this. Their work is laborious, made possible by the fact that it’s by far their primary responsibility.

    It needed to be much easier than this to find out more about India’s first homegrown astronauts. ISRO itself has been mum, so much so that every new ISRO story is turning out to be an investigative story. The details of Shukla’s exploits needed to be interesting, too. The haven’t been.

    So now, Shukla’s returning from the International Space Station. It’s really not clear what one’s expected to be excited about…

    Featured image credit: Ray Hennessy/Unsplash.

  • India’s next man in space

    NASA/SpaceX/Axiom will make their next attempt to launch the Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station on June 11. Axiom Space’s tagline for the mission is “Realizing the Return”, alluding to three of the mission’s four crew members, including India’s Shubhanshu Shukla, will be taking their respective countries back to orbit after at least four decades (figuratively speaking).

    Shukla of course has a greater mission to look forward to beyond Axiom-4: ISRO had purchased Shukla’s seat on the flight for a princely Rs 548 crore reportedly to expose him to the operational aspects of a human spaceflight mission ahead of Gaganyaan’s first crewed flight in 2027. So obviously there’s been a lot of hoopla over the Axiom-4 launch in India on TV channels and social media platforms.

    Of course, the energy levels aren’t anywhere near what they were for Chandrayaan-3 and that’s good. In fact I’m also curious why there’s any energy vis-a-vis Shukla’s flight at all, at least beyond the nationalist circles. Axiom-4 is all NASA, Axiom, and SpaceX. Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to the US in early 2023, the White House issued a statement in which it said the two countries would strengthen “cooperation on human spaceflight, including establishing exchanges that will include advanced training for an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)/Department of Space astronaut at NASA Johnson Space Center”.

    This astronaut turned out to be Shukla, and he will be joined by Prashant Nair — another of the four astronaut-candidates — as one of the two back-up crew members on Axiom-4. However, I don’t understand why this required Prime Minister Modi to meet US President Joe Biden. ISRO could have set Shukla and Nair up with the same opportunity by directly engaging with NASA, the way its Human Space Flight Centre did with Russia’s Glavcosmos in 2019 itself. More importantly, it’s not clear how Shukla’s participation in the Axiom-4 mission entails “cooperation on human spaceflight” between the US and India, which many commentators in India have been billing it as.

    India has done nothing here other than purchase the seat on Axiom Space’s flight and fly Shukla and Nair over. In the same vein neither ISRO nor the overarching Department of Space, which is overseeing Gaganyaan’s development, have said what exactly Shukla (and Nair) stand to learn from Axiom-4, i.e. the justification for spending Rs 548 crore of the people’s money and how this particular mission was judged to be the best way to acquire the skills and knowledge Shukla (and Nair) reputedly will.

    I’ve been following spaceflight news as a journalist as well as have held managerial jobs for a long time now to understand that Axiom-4 represents the sort of opportunity where one is very likely to learn something if one becomes involved and that Axiom-4 offers something to learn at all because of the articles I’ve read and lectures I’ve heard about why NASA and Roscosmos human spaceflight protocols are the way they are.

    However, what exactly is it that the two astronaut-candidates will learn that isn’t post facto (so that there is a rationale for the Rs 548 crore), why was it deemed important for them to have to learn that (and who deemed it so), how will they apply it to Gaganyaan, and how exactly does the Axiom-4 mission represent India-US “cooperation”?

    India’s space establishment hasn’t provided the answers, and worse yet seems to be under the impression that they’re not necessary to provide. The public narrative at this time is focused on Shukla and how his time has come. I sincerely hope the money represented more than a simple purchase, and I’m disappointed that it’s come down to hope to make sense of ISRO’s and the Department of Space’s decisions.

  • Williams’s success is… ours?

    A day before NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore were to return onboard a SpaceX crew capsule, Prime Minister Narendra Modi published a letter in which he said he had inquired after her when he met U.S. President Donald Trump and that even if “you are thousands of miles away, you remain in our hearts”.

    Union Minister of State Jitendra Singh declared “a moment of glory, pride and relief” when Williams, whom he called “this illustrious daughter of India”, splashed down in Florida Bay. He lauded her “for the courage, conviction and consistency with which she endured the uncertainties of space”.

    If one had only Singh’s note to read, one may not have realised another person, Barry Wilmore, endured what she had or that there were two other astronauts in the capsule when it descended. Yet Singh’s peers, including Jyotiraditya Scindia and Piyush Goyal, also published similar posts on their LinkedIn profiles extolling Williams alone. Scindia even thanked the other two astronauts “for rescuing our brave warriors of the space”. ISRO chimed in as well.

    Williams was born in Ohio to Indian and Slovene American parents; her father emigrated from India in 1958. As such, she lived, studied, and worked all in the US. While the extent to which she is “Indian” per se is debatable, self-identity is personal and ultimately for Williams to determine.

    In the last half year, however, many news reports in the mainstream press have referred to her as being of “Indian origin” or as “Indian-American”. Labels like this are poorly defined, if at all; writers and authors typically use them on the basis of a pulse or a sentiment. Are they accurate? It might seem that it does not matter whether a minister refers to Williams as a ‘woman of India’, that there is no price to pay. But there is.

    In and of themselves, the pronouncements about Williams are not problematic. They become that way when one recalls what has been given to her, and by whom, that has been denied to many others, some arguably more deserving. An example from recent memory is wrestlers Vinesh Phogat and Sakshi Malik, whose peaceful protest to reform India’s professional wrestling administration was quelled violently by police acting on orders of the Union government. They were not “India’s daughters” then.

    The year after, in 2024, when Phogat was disqualified from participating in the finals of the 50-kg wrestling event at the Paris Olympics, the immediate reaction was to allege a conspiracy, blame her for not trying hard “enough”, and to ask whether she had let Indians down even though the prime minister had “let” her participate despite her role in the protests.

    There was no meaningful discussion or dialogue in government circles about systematically averting the circumstances that saw Phogat exit the Olympics, instead it seemed to grate that she had come so close to a monumental success yet still missed out.

    The chief minister of Haryana, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre, celebrated Phogat’s return to India as if she had had a podium finish, arranging for merriment on the streets of her home state. It was an attempt to paper over his peers’ accountability with sound and fury.

    Williams occupies a similar liminal space: as Phogat had lost yet not lost, Williams was not Indian yet Indian — both narratives twisting the lived realities of these women in the service of a common message: that India is great. Williams’s feats in the space and spaceflight domains have been exceptional, but neither more than other astronauts who have gone to space on long missions nor because India had any role in facilitating it.

    Presumably in response to an excellent article by Chethan Dash at The Times of India, Singh said on March 19 that the government had not arranged for India’s own astronaut-designates — the four men in the shortlist to pilot Gaganyaan’s maiden crewed flight — to have conversations with the press and the public at large, at a time when an exceptional number of people were interested in Williams’s life and work. The government had clearly missed an invaluable opportunity to build interest in the Indian space programme. Its excuse did not wash either: that the astronauts had to not be “distracted”.

    The loud and repeated bids to coopt Williams’s success as India’s by extension has been disingenuous, a continuing pattern of crusting the shell with as many jewels as possible to hide the infirmity within.

    Featured image: Astronauts Joan Higginbotham and Sunita Williams work at the Space Station Remote Manipulator System onboard the ISS, December 12, 2006. Credit: NASA.

  • Solve all our problems

    This is xkcd #1232. When it came out I remember it was to rebut a particular line of argument against NASA’s lunar and interplanetary missions — that the agency was spending large sums of money that would be better spent on “solving problems on Earth”. Considering Earth would always have problems, xkcd and others contended, we’d never be able to go to space if we had to spend all our time, money, and labours fixing them. The snark implied in #1232 was warranted.

    But recently, I saw this comic used in a different context: during a conversation (in a private group) about Elon Musk’s aggression with SpaceX and his plans to colonise the moon and visit Mars in his lifetime. Insofar as #1232 pushed back against space exploration that couldn’t by any measure subtract from public spending on socio-economic welfare and justice, it was clever and good. But in the conversation in the group, #1232 donned a new implication: of reducing any other (even minimally) legitimate criticism of the world’s plans to land probes on the moon, establish lunar bases, and start the human campaign to permanently settle the moon and of Elon Musk’s and SpaceX’s plans to being an argument about spending on space exploration subtracting from more immediately measurable pursuits.

    Two arguments come to mind that are poorly served by such flattening. First: the pace at which SpaceX has been manufacturing satellites, launching rockets, and expanding its satellite constellations is at odds with its, and our, ability to deal with the environmental footprint of these activities. Neither SpaceX nor Musk have made any provisions for the activities to be sustainable and they should asap. Doing so might slow the company down, and the company needs to stop considering this retardation to be undesirable. Yet SpaceX’s supporters have often construed any criticism of the company’s pace to be criticism of the company altogether and as the argument that its money would be better spent doing other things.

    Second: I was recently asked a curious question during a formal engagement at work. Is it ethical for India to spend so much on Gaganyaan considering we live in a world with war, violence, and poverty? Gaganyaan has so far cost the Indian government more than Rs 11,000 crore. But there are a couple underlying assumptions here, leading up to questions of the ethicality of human spaceflight, that are flawed.

    (i) The allocation of resources for various activities isn’t a zero-sum game in India. The national budget is voluminous enough for the government to fund both human spaceflight and poverty alleviation programmes. Also unlike in game theory, fractional outcomes are possible and possibly more desirable. For example, India can make great strides in its poverty alleviation programme if it diverts only 0.1% of its defence spending (Rs 6.2 lakh crore in 2024-2025) that way.

    (ii) Many of us like to believe if we don’t spend money on X, it will be available for Y. (Here, X could be ’spaceflight’ and Y could be ‘alleviating poverty’.) We don’t stop to ask whether the state will divert it to Z instead (say, ‘missiles’). If we’d like to guarantee X → Y, we need to persuade the state to rejig its existing priorities and prevent X → Z. Expecting ISRO to not pursue Gaganyaan with funds provided by the state isn’t reasonable.

    In sum, it seems like the “let’s first fix all problems on Earth” argument has become both straw man and red herring in conversations about off-world human activities whose benefits aren’t entirely clear at the moment. The real problem is of course that the benefits aren’t clear, not that the activities are happening at all, plus the belief that money spared by not performing one activity will automatically become available for the precise alternative activity we’re rooting for.

  • 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.