Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: Indian Space Research Organisation

  • On the BBC, talking about Gaganyaan and inspiration

    The BBC has produced a documentary podcast titled ‘Hope and fear: India’s space revolution’. Its host, Alok Jha of The Economist, interviewed me late last year as part of it, to provide a media perspective of the Indian space programme, in particular Gaganyaan, access to ISRO scientists, the role of prestige, and the place of a spaceflight programme in a democracy. I was able to listen to it by downloading a copy of the 49-minute documentary from the link above (the 64-kbps version is 22 MB). It is also available on platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts. If you’re interested, the narrative and context for my portion begin from 23:15.

    The overall narrative takes an outside-in perspective, which is understandable given the foreign audience. This is also evident in how many parts of the narrative have been crafted, including the amount of awe towards what India is attempting vis-à-vis space and the ‘balance’ of ideas the documentary contains, which in some parts could come across like a false balance to listeners in India. That said, I’d recommend listening to the whole thing because of the diverse voices quoted, including Seetha Somasundaram, Madhavan Nair, Jahnavi Phalkey, and Anil Menon. This is generally hard to get in a single journalistic item and it’s valuable to consider them all together on a complex topic like this. Given the Indian government’s greater sensitivity to how it is being perceived by foreign governments of the Global North, it’s also useful to get a sense of how foreign media are treating its efforts in spaceflight. I myself expect to revisit the documentary in the coming months as Gaganyaan nears its first crewed test flight and as ISRO investigates the twin PSLV failures.

    After my portion, Alok speaks to Anil Menon, who’s the NASA astronaut-candidate expected to fly to the ISS this July, about the cost-benefit analyses that have come up thus far in the narrative and how he weighs them. In the documentary overall, the arguments to justify India’s pursuit of human spaceflight include spin-off technologies, the point that there’s a “small window” for India to join in, that it’s prestigious, and that it’s inspirational. I don’t think any of these are sufficient reasons to have a human spaceflight programme.

    Spin-off technologies and allied industries — I’d argued against the value of spin-off technologies in a February 2025 essay about ISRO’s future. Alok and the documentary’s producer, Dave Anderson, had said they decided to speak to me after reading it, so here’s a relevant excerpt:

    … the more vehement supporters of India’s plans have advanced three typical arguments: (i) partaking of the comity of nations, (ii) not losing out on future opportunities, and (iii) the value of spin-off technologies. Speculative though the value of all three are, they can’t be dismissed out of hand. Argument (i) in particular is quite valuable: countries working together on space missions can reduce the per-country costs as well as open new channels for soft diplomacy. The value of (ii) and (iii) is more obvious: to keep opportunity costs in future from surging while amortising them in the interim by taking advantage of the new technologies that become available in the course of achieving those overarching goals.

    But a direct counterargument here is that the cost of attaining these new technologies can be much lower if we pursued them in a more direct manner rather than anticipating them as spin-offs. More broadly, if there is one correct answer to how ISRO and India should orient themselves — joining the pursuit of greater goals versus being led by Indians’ needs — it has yet to present itself. The leaders of the Indian space programme also haven’t explicitly articulated what their long-term priorities are nor how they are to be determined.”

    Another argument that comes up during the documentary is that spaceflight more broadly, by virtue of its scale and complexity, demands a bunch of allied industries that grow to depend on each other and thus sustain each other. I’m more sympathetic to this argument because it’s a sensible way to go about cultivating a full-fledged space industry — but what is still missing is an explicit articulation, even an informal one, by the government that it’s doing X in order to achieve Y over the longer term.

    The first pitfall here is that without knowing Y and how it’s supposed to be related to X, it’s going to be hard to hold the government accountable: after many years it can simply achieve Z instead of Y and say Y was meant to be Z all along. The second pitfall is related: the same capital directed elsewhere — into biotech or infrastructure, say — could generate equal or even more efficient linkages. So once again we’re back to the question of why (human) spaceflight in particular.

    A deeper problem is that the argument of linkages is often unfalsifiable as stated since any large and sufficiently complex programme can be credited in hindsight with downstream industries. Given that India also hasn’t analysed a counterfactual scenario, it’s really hard to believe spaceflight is the only endeavour that can achieve what the government says it can for the country.

    Small window — I agree that there’s a window defined by geopolitical and strategic interests within which one can begin a programme to become capable of human spaceflight and find oneself at, or more realistically near, the forefront as the enterprise matures. But if you look past the opportunity it seemingly presents for India, you’ll find that it’s cynical: it’s an enterprise that’s aspiring to leave certain peoples and countries behind. Ideally the window should never close and the opportunities shouldn’t be limited to the narrow definition of commerce where the early bird takes all.

    For instance, say India misses this window: it should still be possible to find a meaningful, gainful, and non-marginal role. Dubai has no significant industrial or manufacturing base of its own but has positioned itself into a nerve centre of global finance and logistics. There’s no reason India can’t cultivate analogous leverage in the spacefaring economy, for instance by developing ground infrastructure and tracking systems that other nations can lease, a talent pool that staffs the mission-control rooms and research divisions of programmes elsewhere or a regulatory environment that attracts commercial launch operators seeking a jurisdiction that’s rigorous without being prohibitive.

    In fact, I’m reminded of Homi Bhabha chairing the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955 — a time when India didn’t have nuclear power, only aspirations and, importantly, the awareness that leadership doesn’t mean being a bully on the playground so much as the teacher who can get everyone to play together. In the same vein India could be the place to litigate and arbitrate disputes under space laws or which produces the delicate human and psychological scientific knowledge that facilitates long-duration missions. There are plenty of options, and the biggest mistake we can make right now is to believe there’s only one.

    Prestige — As I’ve said before and also do so during the documentary, national prestige is faulty essentially because it’s possible to build it through virtually any enterprise. Spaceflight in particular may offer the shortest path to it, especially if you’re well-funded. A good example is the UAE’s “space programme”, which I wrote about here. But just as well, it’s possible to build prestige in primary healthcare (like Cuba), school education (Finland), public transport (Colombia), labour rights (Uruguay), social support (South Africa), women’s safety (Rwanda) or in fact national integration, where India has some unique opportunities but which it has often squandered.

    The fact is picking spaceflight as a matter of prestige is a political choice, and it merits asking why the powers that be picked this particular one over others. And from what I’ve seen over the last decade, it’s not an accidental choice. Since 2014 the BJP has defunded the National Health Mission, gutted labour protections, and hollowed out the rights to education and to information while also unveiling the world’s largest cricket stadium and a new legislature that cost at least Rs 20,000 crore to build. Gaganyaan in the same vein is highly photogenic, with a similar cost to the exchequer, and requires no welfare apparatus — so far it hasn’t even forced the government to tie it to social welfare — and which can easily be sold to the Hindu-nationalist imagination as proof that an ancient civilisation has reclaimed its rightful place among the stars.

    In fact, given the weak opposition in Parliament and the forthcoming delimitation exercise that will further empower India’s already-right-wing Hindi heartland to send more ministers to Parliament, national prestige is set to become — if it hasn’t already — a singularly dangerous reason to do anything. (This is why I say in the documentary that I’m “scared” that prestige is the answer to why India is pursuing Gaganyaan at this time.)

    Inspiration — Anil Menon was inspired to become a doctor and then an astronaut because of the Indian and American space programmes. He also says inspiration like this is immeasurable. People are inspired by many things. Spaceflight doesn’t have a monopoly on that. Yes, it provides for awesome spectacles and for stories of profound human triumphs. But if we waited on these narratives alone, we’d also find inspiring instances to be fewer and farther between. Inspiration is magical, not least because it’s hard to explain how it works. There is no science to it but in fact a lot of culture and socio-politics. I’d wager there are orders of magnitude more people who have been inspired by things other than space exploration and spaceflight, and for a bevy of reasons far removed from what makes spaceflight so alluring. Spaceflight has a transformative effect but isn’t the only endeavour to do so. Now, to be fair, Anil isn’t touching on this point in order to justify a human space programme; he was responding to a question about the benefits of sending people to space over satellites and robots.

    A final point: Anil Menon also says human spaceflight requires “intense cooperation, intelligence, skills — all of which India has always had.” The India of today doesn’t cooperate very well. Perhaps the prime minister, the science minister, and the upper echelons of ISRO get along well with their respective counterparts in the US, Europe, Japan, etc. But as Alok and I discuss, the Indian space programme is no longer freely accessible to journalists and by extension to the country’s people. It also has some unfortunate impulses, as exemplified in the curious incident involving the Axiom-4 mission to launch Gaganyaan astronaut-designate Shubhanshu Shukla and others to the ISS, when the ISRO chairman V. Narayanan wanted to take credit for one Falcon 9 launch attempt being called off due to a fuel leak. To the country’s government at this time, it’s all about being seen to be a triumphant civilisation.

  • Normalising deviance

    When a rocket launches, we usually only care about one thing: did it work? We cheer if it reaches orbit and we gasp if it doesn’t. The French philosopher Bruno Latour called this “black boxing” because when a machine is successful we stop looking at its complex inner parts, we just see an input, which is the launch, and then a satellite in orbit. The box becomes sealed by its own success. But Latour also found that a black box must crack open when things break: when a car stalls you need to open the hood. You can no longer ignore the engine and figure it out by working on the chassis.

    ISRO has yet to release the Failure Analysis Committee (FAC) report for the PSLV-C61 mission. For PSLV-C62, a short statement on its website says “a detailed analysis has been initiated”; I’m not sure if this is the same as a new FAC. If the organisation is opening the “black box” only for itself, investigating failures internally while keeping the results secret from the public and independent peers, it’s falling into a trap Latour expected: that objectivity doesn’t come from a single person or a single agency looking really hard at a problem but from having as many different people as possible, with different viewpoints and biases, looking at it.

    For years, NASA engineers knew that foam insulation was falling off the external fuel tank and hitting the Space Shuttle. They looked at it constantly and they analysed it. They did open the hood but they also  only talked to each other, and in the process they managed to convince themselves it wasn’t a safety risk. The American sociologist Diane Vaughan called this the ‘normalisation of deviance’: when small departures from conservative practice become routine because of the idea that “nothing bad happened last time”. If they’d released those internal reports to external aerodynamicists or independent safety boards before Columbia lifted off, they likely wouldn’t have had the disaster they did.

    Today ISRO risks the same ‘normalisation of deviance’: without external eyes to challenge its assumptions, its experts are at risk of convincing themselves that a recurring PS3 stage glitch is manageable — right up until it isn’t.

    Latour also often spoke of the ‘parliament of things’, the idea that technologies like rockets are part of our political and social world rather than simply being technical objects. If ISRO solves the problem internally, it might fix the specific valve or sensor or whatever but it won’t fix the institutional pressure that caused the quality control to slip in the first place. Only public scrutiny, i.e. the assembly of MPs and citizens asking irritating questions like “why?”, can force an agency to fix its hardware as well as its culture.

    Then we have institutional memory as well: when you fix a problem in secret you’re also withholding the lessons you’ve learnt from young engineers. Public reports are effectively a permanent, searchable archive of mistakes.

    In the 1979 book Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts he coauthored with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar, Latour defined an “inscription” as any visual display produced by a lab setup, no matter how large or expensive, whose final output is a piece of visual information. For instance, a bioassay might start by pipetting chemicals and shaking tubes but it ends with a sheet of paper with numbers or a jagged line on a graph. That paper is the inscription. And at this point the scientists discard the physical substances (the chemical compounds) and retain the inscription.

    According to Latour, science is almost never a single ‘eureka!’ and almost always a series of inscriptions. This narrative is useful to understand that objectivity in science is often a myth: because scientists don’t just passively observe nature but are writers and craftworkers in their own right and draw on the corresponding skills to make sense of nature. A statement becomes a ‘fact’ only when the inscriptions supporting it are so clear and numerous, so that dissenting voices are silenced, and to challenge a fact you need to produce counter-inscriptions of a similar or greater calibre.

    But when there’s no inscription, when the FAC reports are invisible, what do you challenge if you need to? How do you achieve progress in a rational way?

    The Soviet Union’s N1 rocket was its equivalent of the USA’s Saturn V,  designed to take cosmonauts to the moon. And it failed all four times it launched. An important reason was that, for all its other successes, the Soviet space programme was a sealed box. There was no independent press to ask why the rocket’s engines were exploding and no parliamentary questions about safety protocols — and inside this Matrioshka doll of secrecy its engineers were paralysed by political pressure. When data showed the rocket had a high probability of failure, managers simply massaged the numbers to please the Kremlin. And because the failures were state secrets, the collective intelligence of the scientific community was never brought to bear on the problem.

    Look at NASA’s Challenger disaster in 1986 on the other hand, which was also a tragedy born of a political pressure to launch at all costs. NASA managers had ignored warnings from engineers about the Space Shuttle’s O-rings failing in cold weather; they had, as with Columbia but 17 years earlier, normalised deviance and had accepted small failures right up until they added up to a big one. After the explosion the American system forced the black box open and the Rogers Commission identified the technical fault as well as interrogated the institutional culture. And by publicly airing these concerns — including ‘letting’ Richard Feynman dip an O-ring in ice water on live TV to prove a point — NASA was humiliated, yes, but it was also saved. The scrutiny forced it to rebuild its safety protocols, recover public trust, and allow an object as complex as the Space Shuttle to return to flight, until Columbia revealed this turnaround to have been incomplete.

    Because the Soviet state kept the failures of its N1 missions to the moon a secret, future Russian engineers couldn’t fully study those specific failures in open academic literature. On the other hand NASA’s failures are effectively public textbooks, with engineers in India, Europe, and China today studying its failure reports even today to avoid making the same mistakes. Likewise by hiding the PSLV-C61 report, and the PSLV-C39 FAC report and other reports of a similar nature, ISRO isn’t just hurting itself: it’s hurting the global knowledge base of rocketry. And like the Soviet Union of yore and unlike NASA in the late 1980s and the early 2000s, by shielding its findings from criticism, ISRO is ensuring its solutions are weak and at risk of failing again.

    If ISRO engineers know a failure will be hushed up to protect the prime minister’s image, they may be less likely to speak up about a faulty sensor or a cracked nozzle. If people can’t ask why the PS3 stage failed the pressure to fix it is essentially replaced by the pressure to just “make it look good” for the next launch. In the end by closing itself off ISRO risks becoming a fragile institution. It treats its rockets as matters of fact — unquestionable symbols of national pride — rather than as matters of concern, complex machines that need honest and sometimes harsh public maintenance. There’s a reason transparency is one of the ingredients of good engineering.

  • Robbing NISAR to pay ISRO

    A.K. Anil Kumar, the director of ISRO’s Telemetry, Tracking, and Command Network (a.k.a. ISTRAC), has reportedly made some seriously misleading comments as part of his convocation address at a Maharishi University in Lucknow.* Kumar’s speech begins at the 1:38:10 mark in this video (hat-tip to Pradx):

    A poorly written article in The Free Press Journal (which I couldn’t find online) has amplified Kumar’s claims without understanding that the two satellites Kumar was seemingly talking about are actually one: the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), developed jointly by the US and Indian space agencies. The article carries an image of NISAR but doesn’t caption it as such.

    The article makes several dubious claims:

    • That the “satellite” can forecast earthquakes,
    • That NISAR can capture subsurface images of Earth, including of underground formations,
    • That India’s “satellite” didn’t require a 12-metre-long antenna the way NASA’s “satellite” did, and
    • That ISRO’s “satellite” was built at one-tenth of the cost of NASA’s “satellite”

    To be clear, an ISRO satellite that can forecast earthquakes or image subsurface features and which the organisation built and launched for Rs 1,000 crore does not exist. What actually exists is NISAR, a part of which ISRO built. The claims are almost spiteful because they purport to come from a senior ISRO official whose work likely benefited from the ISRO-NASA collaboration and because he ought to have known better than to mislead.

    NISAR is a dual-frequency (DF) synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The ‘DF’ bit means the satellite captures data on two radar frequencies, L-band and S-band. To quote from a piece I wrote for The Hindu on July 27:

    At the time the two space organisations agreed to build NISAR, NASA and ISRO decided each body would contribute equivalent‑scale hardware, expertise, and funding. … [ISRO] supplied the I‑3K spacecraft bus, the platform that houses the controls to handle command and data, propulsion, and attitude, plus 4 kW of solar power. The same package also included the entire S‑band radar electronics, a high‑rate Ka‑band telecom subsystem, and a gimballed high‑gain antenna.

    ‘SAR’ refers to a remote-sensing technique in which a small antenna moves along a path while using a computer to combine the data it captures along the way, thus mimicking a much larger antenna. NISAR uses a 12-metre mesh antenna plus a reflector for this purpose. Both the S-band and L-band radars use it to perform their functions. As a result of using the SAR technique, the two radars onboard NISAR are able to produce high-resolution images of Earth’s surface irrespective of daylight or cloud cover and support studies of ground deformation, ice sheets, forests, and the oceans.

    In this regard, for The Free Press Journal to claim NISAR “didn’t require India to install a separate 12-metre antenna, unlike NASA” gives the impression that ISRO’s S-band radar didn’t need the antenna. This is wrong: it does need the antenna. That NASA was the agency to build and deploy it on NISAR comes down to the terms of the collaboration agreement, which specified that ISRO would provide the spacecraft bus, the S-band radar (and its attendant components), and the launch vehicle while NASA would take care of everything else. This is the same reason why ISRO’s contributions to NISAR amounted to around Rs 980 crore — which Kumar rounded up to Rs 1,000 crore — whereas NASA’s cost was around Rs 10,000 crore.

    The antenna is in fact an engineering marvel. Without it ISRO’s S-band radar wouldn’t be so performant and thus its data wouldn’t be so useful for decision-making for both research and disaster management. On the day ISRO launched NISAR, on July 30 this year, I got to interview Karen  St. Germain, the director of the Earth Science Division at the Science Mission Directorate at NASA. Here’s an excerpt from the interview about the antenna:

    Both the L-band and the S-band radars use the same reflector. Since S-band has a shorter wavelength than the L-band, does this create any trade-offs in either L-band or S-band performance?

    It doesn’t. And the reason for that is because this is a synthetic aperture radar. It creates its spatial resolution as it moves along. Each radar is taking snapshots as it moves along. You know, to get this kind of centimetre level fidelity and the kind of spatial resolution we’re achieving, if you were to use a solid antenna, it would have to be five miles long. Just like when you’re talking about a camera, if you want to be able to get high fidelity, you need a big lens. Same idea. But we can’t deploy an antenna that big. So what we do is we build up image after image after image to get that resolution. And because of this technique, it’s actually independent of wavelength. It works the same for S- and for L-bands. The only thing that’s a little different is because the antenna feeds for the L-band and the S-band can’t physically occupy the same space, they have to be next to each other and that means there’s a slight difference in the way their pulses reflect off the antenna. There’s that positioning difference, and that we can correct for.

    Could you tell us a little bit more about that slight difference?

    Karen St. Germain:     It’s the way a reflector works. You would ideally want to put the feed at the focal point of the reflector. But when you have two feeds, you can’t do that. So they’re slightly offset. That means they illuminate the reflector just slightly differently. The alignment is just a little bit different. The team optimised the design to minimise that difference and to make it so that they could correct it in post-processing.

    And even for all these abilities, we (i.e. people everywhere) currently don’t know enough to be able to forecast earthquakes. What we can do today is make short-term predictions and we can prepare probabilistic forecasts over a longer period of time. That is, for instance, we can say “there’s a 20% chance of a quake of magnitude 8 or more occurring in the Himalaya in the next century” and we have the means to alert people in an area tens of seconds before an earthquake occurs. We can’t say “there will be an earthquake in Chennai at 3 pm tomorrow”.

    The question for The Free Press Journal is thus what role a satellite can essay in this landscape. In a statement in 2021, ISRO had said “NISAR would provide a means of disentangling highly spatial and temporally complex processes ranging from ecosystem disturbances to ice sheet collapses and natural hazards including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and landslides.” This means NISAR will help scientists better piece together the intricate processes implicated in earthquakes — processes that are distributed over some area and happen over some time. Neither NISAR nor the S-band radar alone can forecast earthquakes.

    On a related note, the L-band (1,000-2,000 MHz) and S-band (2,000-4,000 MHz) radar frequencies do overlap with the frequencies used in ground-penetrating radar (10-4,000 MHz). However, the lower the frequency, the further underground an electromagnetic wave can penetrate (while keeping the resolution fixed). Scientists have documented a ceiling of around 100 MHz for deep geological profiling, which is far from either of NISAR’s radars. Even the L-band radar, which has lower frequency than the S-band, can at best penetrate a few metres underground if the surface is extremely dry, like in a desert, or if the surroundings are made of water ice. What both radars can penetrate very well is cloud cover, heavy rain, and vegetation.

    The ISRO + NASA collaboration that built NISAR was a wonderful thing that the agencies need to replicate in future even as it continued their less formalised engagements from before and whose benefits both host countries, India and the USA, continue to accrue in the satellite observation and remote-sensing domains. For Kumar to call the cost component into question in the way that he did, followed by the The Free Press Journal‘s shoddy coverage of his remarks, does no favours to the prospect of space literacy in the country.

    * I updated this post at 7.45 pm on December 2, 2025, to make it clear that all but one of the objectionable claims were made by The Free Press Journal in its article; the exception was the cost comparison, which Kumar did make.

  • On the PixxelSpace constellation

    The announcement that a consortium led by PixxelSpace India will design, build, and operate a constellation of 12 earth-observation satellites marks a sharp shift in how India approaches large space projects. The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) awarded the project after a competitive process.

    What made headlines was that the winning bid asked for no money from the government. Instead, the group — which includes Piersight Space, SatSure Analytics India, and Dhruva Space — has committed to invest more than Rs 1,200 crore of its own resources over the next four to five years. The constellation will carry a mix of advanced sensors, from multispectral and hyperspectral imagers to synthetic aperture radar, and it will be owned and operated entirely by the private side of the partnership.

    PixxelSpace has said the zero-rupee bid is a conscious decision to support the vision of building an advanced earth-observation system for India and the world. The companies have also expressed belief they will recover their investment over time by selling high-value geospatial data and services in India and abroad. IN-SPACe’s chairman has called this a major endorsement of the future of India’s space economy.

    Of course the benefits for India are clear. Once operational, the constellation should reduce the country’s reliance on foreign sources of satellite imagery. That will matter in areas like disaster management, agriculture planning, and national security, where delays or restrictions on outside data can have serious consequences. Having multiple companies in the consortium brings together strengths in hardware, analytics, and services, which could create a more complete space industry ecosystem. The phased rollout will also mean technology upgrades can be built in as the system grows, without heavy public spending.

    Still, the arrangement raises difficult questions. In practice, this is less a public–private partnership than a joint venture. I assume the state will provide its seal of approval, policy support, and access to launch and ground facilities. If it does share policy support, it will have to explain why that’s vouchsafed for the collaboration isn’t of being expanded to the industry as a whole. I also heard IN-SPACe will ‘collate’ demand within the government for the constellation’s products and help meet them.

    Without assuming a fiscal stake, however, the government is left with less leverage to set terms or enforce priorities, especially if the consortium’s commercial goals don’t always align with national needs. It’s worth asking why the government issued an official request-for-proposal if didn’t intend to assume a stake, and whether the Rs-350-crore soft loan IN-SPACe originally offered for the project will still be available, repurposed or quietly withdrawn.

    I think the pitch will also test public oversight. IN-SPACe will need stronger technical capacity, legal authority, procedural clarity, and better public communication to monitor compliance without frustrating innovation. Regulations on remote sensing and data-sharing will probably have to be updated to cover a fully commercial system that sells services worldwide. Provisions that guarantee government priority access in emergencies and that protect sensitive imagery will have to be written clearly into law and contracts. Infrastructure access, from integration facilities to launch slots, must be managed transparently to avoid bottlenecks or perceived bias.

    The government’s minimal financial involvement saves public money but it also reduces long-term control. If India repeats this model, it should put in place new laws and safeguards that define how sovereignty, security, and public interest are to be protected when critical space assets are run by private companies. Without such steps, the promise of cost-free expansion could instead lead to new dependencies that are even harder to manage in future.

    Featured image credit: Carl Wang/Unsplash.

  • The Zomato ad and India’s hustle since 1947

    In contemporary India, corporate branding has often aligned itself with nationalist sentiment, adopting imagery such as the tricolour, Sanskrit slogans or references to ancient achievements to evoke cultural pride. Marketing narratives frequently frame consumption as a patriotic act, linking the choice of a product with the nation’s progress or “self-reliance”. This fusion of commercial messaging and nationalist symbolism serves both to capitalise on the prevailing political mood and to present companies as partners in the nationalist project. An advertisement in The Times of India on August 15, which describes the work of nation-building as a “hustle”, is a good example.

    I remember in engineering college my class had a small-minded and vindictive professor in our second year of undergraduate studies. He repeatedly picked on one particular classmate to the extent that, as resentment between the two people escalated, the professor’s actions in one arguably innocuous matter resulted in the student being suspended for a semester. He eventually didn’t have the number of credits he needed to graduate and had to spend six more months redoing many of the same classes. Today, this student is a successful researcher in Europe, having gone on to acquire a graduate degree followed by a PhD from some of the best research institutes in the world.

    When we were chatting a few years ago about our batch’s decadal reunion that was coming up, we thought it would be a good idea to attend and, there, rub my friend’s success in this professor’s face. We really wanted to do it because we wanted him to know how petty he had been. But as we discussed how we’d orchestrate this moment, it dawned on us that we’d also be signalling that our achievements don’t amount to more than those necessary to snub him, as if to say they have no greater meaning or purpose. We eventually dropped the idea. At the reunion itself, my friend simply ignored the professor.

    India may appear today to have progressed well past Winston Churchill’s belief, expressed in the early 1930s, but to advertise as Zomato has is to imply that it remains on our minds and animates the purpose of what we’re trying to do. It is a juvenile and frankly resentful attitude that also hints at a more deep-seated lack of contentment. The advertisement’s achievement of choice is the Chandrayaan 3 mission, its Vikram lander lit dramatically by sunlight and earthlight and photographed by the Pragyan rover. The landing was a significant achievement, but to claim that that above all else describes contemporary India is also to dismiss the evident truth that a functional space organisation and a democracy in distress can coexist within the same borders. One neither carries nor excuses the other.

    In fact, it’s possible to argue that ISRO’s success is at least partly a product of the unusual circumstances of its creation and its privileged place in the administrative structure. Founded by a scientist who worked directly with Jawaharlal Nehru — bypassing the bureaucratic hurdles faced by most others — ISRO was placed under the purview of the prime minister, ensuring it received the political attention, resources, and exemptions that are not typically available to other ministries or public enterprises. In this view, ISRO’s achievements are insulated from the broader fortunes of the country and can’t be taken as a reliable proxy for India’s overall ‘success’.

    The question here is: to whose words do we pay attention? Obviously not those of Churchill: his prediction is nearly a century old. In fact, as Ramachandra Guha sets out in the prologue of India After Gandhi (which I’m currently rereading), they seem in their particular context to be untempered and provocative.

    In the 1940s, with Indian independence manifestly round the corner, Churchill grumbled that he had not becoming the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. A decade previously he had tried to rebuild a fading political career on the plank of opposing self-government for Indians. After Gandhi’s ‘salt satyagraha’ of 1930 in protest against taxes on salt, the British government began speaking with Indian nationalists about the possibility of granting the colony dominion status. This was vaguely defined, with no timetable set for its realization. Even so, Churchill called the idea ‘not only fantastic in itself but criminally mischievous in its effects’. Since Indians were not fit for self-government, it was necessary to marshal ‘the sober and resolute forces of the British Empire’ to stall any such possibility.

    In 1930 and 1931 Churchill delivered numerous speeches designed to work up, in most unsober form, the constituency opposed to independence for India. Speaking to an audience at the City of London in December 1930, he claimed that if the British left the subcontinent, then an ‘army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany, will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindu’.

    This said, Guha continues later in the prologue:

    The forces that divide India are many. … But there are also forces that have kept India together, that have helped transcend or contain the cleavages of class and culture, that — so far, at least — have nullified those many predictions that India would not stay united and not stay democratic. These moderating influences are far less visible. … they have included individuals as well as institutions.

    Indeed, reading through the history of independent India, through the 1940s and ’50s filled with hope and ambition, the turmoil of the ’60s and the ’70s, the Emergency, followed by economic downturn, liberalisation, finally to the rise of Hindu nationalism, it has been clear that the work of the “forces that have kept India together” is unceasing. Earlier, the Constitution’s framework, with its guarantees of rights and democratic representation, provided a common political anchor. Regular elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary reinforced faith in the system even as the linguistic reorganisation of states reduced separatist tensions. National institutions such as the armed forces, civil services, and railways fostered a sense of shared identity across disparate regions.

    Equally, integrative political movements and leaders — including the All India Kisan Sabha, trade union federations like INTUC and AITUC, the Janata Party coalition of 1977, Akali leaders in Punjab in the post-1984 period, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, and so on, as well as Lal Bahadur Shastri, Govind Ballabh Pant, C. Rajagopalachari, Vinoba Bhave, Jayaprakash Narayan, C.N. Annadurai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and so on — operated despite sharp disagreements largely within constitutional boundaries, sustaining the legitimacy of the Union. Today, however, most of these “forces” are directed at a more cynical cause of disunity: a nationalist ideology that has repeatedly defended itself with deceit, evasion, obfuscation, opportunism, pietism, pretence, subterfuge, vindictiveness, and violence.

    In this light, to claim we have “just put in the work, year after year”, as if to suggest India has only been growing from strength to strength, rather than lurching from one crisis to the next and of late becoming a little more balkanised as a result, is plainly disingenuous — and yet entirely in keeping with the alignment of corporate branding with nationalist sentiment, which is designed to create a climate in which criticism of corporate conduct is framed as unpatriotic. When companies wrap themselves in the symbols of the nation and position their products or services as contributions to India’s progress, questioning their practices risks being cast as undermining that progress. This can blunt scrutiny of resource over-extraction, environmental degradation, and exploitative labour practices by accusing dissenters of obstructing development.

    Aggressively promoting consumption and consumerism (“fuel your hustle”), which drives profits but also deepens social inequalities in the process, is recast as participating in the patriotic project of economic growth. When corporate campaigns subtly or explicitly endorse certain political agendas, their association with national pride can normalise those positions and marginalise alternative views. In this way, the fusion of commerce and nationalism builds market share while fostering a superficial sense of national harmony, even as it sidelines debates on inequality, exclusion, and the varied experiences of different communities within the nation.

  • Frugality is a toxic chalice

    From ‘Earth Imaging Satellite NISAR Exposes NASA’s Weaknesses, ISRO’s Strengths’, NDTV, July 26, 2025:

    At the end of the day, the US scientists have swallowed their pride and are sheepishly going to watch the launch of a satellite where they have invested nearly $1.15 billion. It is this exorbitant cost by NASA that should also be a reason for Americans to squirm and be uncomfortable.

    When ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission entered into orbit around Mars, The New York Times carried a cartoon showing a dhoti-clad man holding a cow in one hand and knocking with the other asking to be let into a room where he could sit with the world’s other major space powers. The paragraph above as well as many others in the NDTV article are simply the other side of the same coin: one cast ISRO as a frugal simpleton and the other takes exorbitant pride in ISRO’s frugality.

    If it isn’t clear by now, however, ISRO’s lower costs stem from the fact that it’s simply underfunded and its staff underpaid. ISRO has spent less than other space agencies but how similar are the corresponding missions? The organisation’s payloads are often much lighter, carry fewer instruments, and are less capable of cutting edge science. The bigger story is that ISRO is trying (and which could be even bigger if there was a long-term plan that showed how all the smaller scale attempts added up). However, it’s not that ISRO is doing what NASA is because it simply isn’t.

    There is no reason for NASA to squirm and be uncomfortable, either: the cost reflects the strength of the US dollar and the organisation of the US economy. It also accounts for NASA being responsible for receiving, processing, distributing, and archiving NISAR data for the whole world, whereas ISRO is responsible for doing the same thing only vis-à-vis India.

    The NDTV article goes on to say:

    There are many reasons behind the huge cost incurred by NASA, one of them being that most of the development of the instruments and payloads they fly are made by huge multi-national corporations and they not only need huge profits but also need to share dividends with their share-holders. ISRO, on the other hand, being a national entity does these things in-house and has no reason to pad up the cost to share profits with share-holders.

    NASA’s principal contribution to NISAR was the L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and the associated avionics and the 12-m mesh antenna plus the 9-m boom holding it. All these components were made at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just as ISRO’s contributions onboard NISAR came from its Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad.

    Additionally, an ISRO official said that when their scientists travel to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena in California, they would stay in shared $100 a day room while the NASA scientists when they travel to the UR Rao Satellite Center in Bengaluru would stay in an over $500 a day room. This automatically inflates the costs.

    We’re talking about a monetary difference of more than 10x between nine- and ten-digit figures. I highly doubt that a small group of scientists staying for N number of days in $500 rooms could make much of a difference. Even if these costs added up in the alleged manner, living comfortably in clean environs is more important than roughing it out to save pennies. I’m also tempted to say that rooms and kitchens in cheaper hotels in the US are likely cleaner than most hotels in India.

    Also, India usually makes only one instrument the one that will fly into space, while NASA makes an engineering model and flight model, which leads to doubling the cost.

    It increases the cost. However, the engineering model is a fully functional hardware unit that can be subjected to full-scale integration testing without risking the actual flight unit. Teams can also work on software development, system integration, and ground testing in parallel while the flight model is still being assembled, avoiding bottlenecks and improving the flight model’s build. If an issue arises after launch, engineers on the ground replicate the problem on the engineering model before trying fixes on the actual spacecraft — an ability that came in handy during the Boeing Starliner crewed flight test. Finally, the engineering model is subjected to more aggressive and destructive testing, and what engineers learn they use to improve the flight model, increasing the chances that it will succeed. In the end, for the additional cost, NASA is able to send better instruments to space that operate within narrower margins of error.

    The funny thing is ISRO may also have to switch to similar developmental processes in future as it embarks on more sophisticated projects, including interplanetary sample-return missions and crewed lunar landings. I hope ISRO, unlike NDTV, isn’t taking overmuch pride in its supposed frugality.

    The way human power is distributed is also very different between NASA and ISRO at the Indian space agency. In the case of NISAR, which has taken over 11 years to build, the teams at ISRO working on multiple satellites and the salaries in India also turn out to be much lower when converted into dollar terms. The top manager at ISRO also pointed out that ISRO engineers are willing to put in long hours and work over weekends, while the US contract engineers are reluctant to put in long hours.

    Don’t just convert it into dollar terms. Also check whether the values of each work-hour with respect to the national economy in the two countries are comparable. Short of that, let’s avoid such comparisons altogether.

    There’s also more than meets the eye in valorising people being “willing” to put in longer hours and to work over the weekends while diminishing a person’s reluctance to do so. In fact, there’s a thin line between a person volunteering to put in extra and a person being expected to put in extra. I’ve seen firsthand company cultures veering over time to make the latter a foundational expectation, with managers often justifying it by saying things like “this is what it takes”, “do it for the <insert cause here>”, and “if you don’t want to, you’re in the wrong industry”. It is a worker’s right to limit their working hours to the stipulated ones. If India’s satellites are cheaper because ISRO is overworking its labour force, we’re doing it wrong — and the bill will soon come due.

    The premium for insurance also adds to the costs at ISRO since the government takes the full liability and no insurance is taken. In other countries, insurance premiums can be a huge cost. Incidentally, when India launched its communication satellite using the SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket, India also took insurance.

    NISAR costs around $1.5 billion. If I’m not mistaken, launch insurance typically costs 15-25% of the total insured value, which is the cost to replace the satellite and to launch it. In this case that would be $225-375 million. After launch coverage expires (which is when the satellite completes one year in orbit), the annual in-orbit insurance usually costs 1-3% per year, which is around $15-45 million a year. Given NISAR’s expected lifetime of three years, the total insurance cost could be $255-465 million; if we go by NISAR’s design lifetime of five-plus years, it could come to $285-555 million.

    The NDTV article also calls out the irony inherent to a NASA satellite scheduled to lift off onboard a GSLV Mk-II rocket. To the uninitiated: this is deserved because the US government scuttled a deal in the early 1980s for the Soviet Union to transfer cryogenic engine technology to India. India was subsequently forced to develop the engines on its own by taking apart and studying the Soviet engines it was able to buy, ultimately building the machine that powers the third stage of the GSLV Mk-II. (Edit: updated at 8.43 pm on July 31, 2025, from “fourth” to “third” stage.) However, the narrative goes on:

    Some would say this is an irony of ironies, and some would say it is egg on the face of US.

    Unless the article could quote someone (by name) actually making these claims, the strength of language in the second half of the statement is unfounded. In fact, the author may have been better off staking the claim themselves — “I believe this is egg on the US’s face” — but even then they will have to justify how it can be reconciled with several changes in NASA’s and the US’s leadership as well as policies regarding working with ISRO/India since the 1980s.

    Rather than concern ourselves with superficial one-upmanship, we would be better off discussing the demands of the different realities of ISRO and NASA. Both organisations have made conscious choices to develop spacecraft the way they do. Their needs are different and their political-economic contexts are wildly different. Expenditure and achievement may not be directly related because material and labour costs are lower in India yet they are deeply connected to an ambition mismatch as well. In order for ISRO to contribute Rs 800 crore to a climate-focused Earth-observing mission, (i) NASA had to conceive of NISAR based on climate scientists’ inputs and (ii) spend $1.1 billion of its own for the L-band SAR and the giant antenna, without which even ISRO’s S-band SAR wouldn’t have the resolution and swath width it currently does. But to be sure: one’s ambitions are not ‘greater’ than the other’s; they’re just different.t

    It also matters that, leading up to the launch, NASA officials and scientists have embarked on a media blitz. It’s proving really easy right now to catch hold of a NASA scientist for an extended interview on NISAR — but not an ISRO scientist.

    For all these reasons, it’s always more sensible to celebrate ISRO in terms that don’t invoke rupees or by comparing and contrasting its feats with that of another space agency.

  • 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.

  • Enfeebling the Indian space programme

    There’s no denying that there currently prevails a public culture in India that equates criticism, even well-reasoned, with pooh-poohing. It’s especially pronounced in certain geographies where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys majority support as well as vis-à-vis institutions that the subscribers of Hindu politics consider to be ripe for international renown, especially in the eyes of the country’s former colonial masters. The other side of the same cultural coin is the passive encouragement it offers to those who’d play up the feats of Indian enterprises even if they lack substantive evidence to back their claims up. While these tendencies are pronounced in many enterprises, I have encountered them most often in the spaceflight domain.

    Through its feats of engineering and administration over the years, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has cultivated a deserved reputation of setting a high bar for itself and meeting them. Its achievements are the reason why India is one of a few countries today with a functionally complete space programme. It operates launch vehicles, conducts spaceflight-related R&D, has facilities to develop as well as track satellites, and maintains data-processing pipeliness to turn the data it collects from space into products usable for industry and academia. It is now embarking on a human spaceflight programme as well. ISRO has also launched interplanetary missions to the moon and Mars, with one destined for Venus in the works. In and of itself the organisation has an enviable legacy. Thus, unsurprisingly, many sections of the Hindutva brigade have latched onto ISRO’s achievements to animate their own propaganda of India’s greatness, both real and imagined.

    The surest signs of this adoption are most visible when ISRO missions fail or succeed in unclear ways. The Chandrayaan 2 mission and the Axiom-4 mission respectively are illustrative examples. As if to forestall any allegations that the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed, then ISRO chairman K. Sivam said right after its Vikram lander crashed on the moon that it had been a “98% success”. Chandrayaan 2 was a technology demonstrator and it did successfully demonstrate most of those onboard very well. The “98%” figure, however, was so disproportionate as to suggest Sivan was defending the mission less on its merits than on its ability to fit into reductive narratives of how good ISRO was. (Recall, similarly, when former DCGI V.G. Somani claimed the homegrown Covaxin vaccine was “110% safe” when safety data from its phase III clinical trials weren’t even available.)

    On the other hand, even as the Axiom-4 mission was about to kick off, neither ISRO nor the Department of Space (DoS) had articulated what Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla’s presence onboard the mission was expected to achieve. If these details didn’t actually exist before the mission, to participate in which ISRO had paid Axiom Space more than Rs 500 crore, both ISRO and the DoS were effectively keeping the door open to picking a goalpost of their choosing to kick the ball through as the mission progressed. If they did have these details but had elected to not share them, their (in)actions raised — or ought to have — difficult questions about the terms on which these organisations believed they were accountable in a democratic country. Either way, the success of the Axiom-4 mission vis-à-vis Shukla’s participation was something of an empty vessel: a ready receptacle for any narrative that could be placed inside ex post facto.

    At the same time, raising this question has often been construed in the public domain, but especially on social media platforms, in response to arguments presented in the news, and in conversations among people interested in Indian spaceflight, as naysaying Shukla’s activities altogether. By all means let’s celebrate Shukla’s and by extension India’s ‘citius, altius, fortius’ moment in human spaceflight; the question is: what didn’t ISRO/DoS share before Axiom-4 lifted off and why? (Note that what journalists have been reporting since liftoff, while valuable, isn’t the answer to the question posed here.) While it’s tempting to think this pinched communication is a strategy developed by the powers that be to cope with insensitive reporting in the press, doing so would also ignore the political capture institutions like ISRO have already suffered and which ISRO arguably has as well, during and after Sivan’s term as chairman.

    For just two examples of institutions that have historically enjoyed a popularity comparable in both scope and flavour to that of ISRO, consider India’s cricket administration and the Election Commission. During the 2024 men’s T20 World Cup that India eventually won, the Indian team had the least amount of travel and the most foreknowledge on the ground it was to play its semifinal game on. At the 2023 men’s ODI World Cup, too, India played all its matches on Sundays, ensuring the highest attendance for its own contests rather than be able to share that opportunity with all teams. The tournament is intended to be a celebration of the sport after all. For added measure, police personnel were also deployed at various stadia to take away spectators’ placards and flags in support of Pakistan in matches featuring the Pakistani team. The stage management of both World Cups only lessened, rather than heightened, the Indian team’s victories.

    It’s been a similar story with the Election Commission of India, which has of late come under repeated attack from the Indian National Congress party and some of its allies for allegedly rigging their electronic voting machines and subsequently entire elections in favour of the BJP. While the Congress has failed to submit the extraordinary evidence required to support these extraordinary claims, doubts about the ECI’s integrity have spread anyway because there are other, more overt ways in which the once-independent institution of Indian democracy favours the BJP — including scheduling elections according to the availability of party supremo Narendra Modi to speak at rallies.

    Recently, a more obscure but nonetheless pertinent controversy erupted in some circles when in an NDTV report incumbent ISRO chairman V. Narayanan seemed to suggest that SpaceX called one of the attempts to launch Axiom-4 off because his team at ISRO had insisted that the company thoroughly check its rocket for bugs. The incident followed SpaceX engineers spotting a leak on the rocket. The point of egregiousness here is that while SpaceX had built and flown that very type of rocket hundreds of times, Narayanan and ambiguous wording in the NDTV report made it out to be that SpaceX would have flown the rocket if not for ISRO’s insistence. What’s more likely to have happened is NASA and SpaceX engineers would have consulted ISRO as they would have consulted the other agencies involved in the flight — ESA, HUNOR, and Axiom Space — about their stand, and the ISRO team on its turn would have clarified its position: that SpaceX recheck the rocket before the next launch attempt. However, the narrative “if not for ISRO, SpaceX would’ve flown a bad rocket” took flight anyway.

    Evidently these are not isolated incidents. The last three ISRO chairmen — Sivan, Somanath, and now Narayanan — have progressively curtailed the flow of information from the organisation to the press even as they have maintained a steady pro-Hindutva, pro-establishment rhetoric. All three leaders have also only served at ISRO’s helm when the BJP was in power at the Centre, wielding its tendency to centralise power by, among others, centralising the permissions to speak freely. Some enterprising journalists like Chethan Kumar and T.S. Subramanian and activists like r/Ohsin and X.com/@SolidBoosters have thus far kept the space establishment from resembling a black hole. But the overarching strategy is as simple as it is devious: while critical arguments become preoccupied by whataboutery and fending off misguided accusations of neocolonialist thinking (“why should we measure an ISRO mission’s success the way NASA measures its missions’ successes?”), unconditional expressions of support and adulation spread freely through our shared communication networks. This can only keep up a false veil of greatness that crumbles the moment it brooks legitimate criticism, becoming desperate for yet another veil to replace itself.

    But even that is beside the point: to echo the philosopher Bruno Latour, when criticism is blocked from attending to something we have all laboured to build, that something is deprived of the “care and caution” it needs to grow, to no longer be fragile. Yet that’s exactly what the Indian space programme risks becoming today. Here’s a brand new case in point, from the tweets that prompted this post: according to an RTI query filed by @SolidBoosters, India’s homegrown NavIC satellite navigation constellation is just one clock failure away from “complete operational collapse”. The issue appears to be ISRO’s subpar launch cadence and the consequently sluggish replacement of clocks that have already failed.

    Granted, rushed critiques and critiques designed to sting more than guide can only be expected to elicit defensive posturing. But to minimise one’s exposure to all criticism altogether, especially those from learned quarters and conveyed in respectful language, is to deprive oneself of the pressure and the drive to solve the right problems in the right ways, both drawing from and adding to India’s democratic fabric. The end results are public speeches and commentary that are increasingly removed from reality as well as, more importantly, thicker walls between criticism and The Thing it strives to nurture.

  • Four years

    Engineering as a methodology … contains a fundamentally materialist kernel, even if its present incarnation as a bourgeois science drives engineers to think and behave otherwise.

    — Nick Chavez, Engineers, Materialism, and the Communist Method

    After school, I studied mechanical engineering against my will. Most engineering students at the time did, and probably still do. Almost every Indian family not in the top 1% of the top 1% (it’s still a large number given the population) of society by wealth would like to get there. And to this day studying to be an engineer or a doctor seems like the safest bet to ensure families get onto and/or stay on that path.

    My family was the same way in 2006. I insisted I wanted to study English literature but my folks were having none of it. When push came to shove, I yielded and said I’d study mechanical engineering only because my father had, too, 24 years earlier. The next four years turned out to be terrible. While it might seem straightforward enough from the outside, having to endure four years of something one is not at all interested in, especially when one is keenly aware that four years amounts to fully one-fifth of one’s life by that point, is corrosive to the spirit. It certainly made my future seem quite bleak to me, more so since I’d internalised my stream of poor grades to mean I was unfit to make it in this world.

    Fortunately (such as it was), my folks relented in my third year and faced me with the freedom to decide what I’d do after engineering college. Thus I picked journalism, figuring I could combine my fondness for writing with the prospect of making some money, at least more than a career in English literature in India might have yielded. It remains among the best decisions I’ve ever made — but as it would later turn out, thanks in no small part to my background as a trained engineer.

    A recurring motif I’ve observed in journalism as it is practised is that people who enter it with skills from a completely different field almost always have an advantage right away (while those who came in after having studied only journalism don’t). There are many ways to classify the activities and rituals of journalism and one is in terms of generalists and beat-experts. (I’m using ‘expertise’ here to mean the “temporary expertise” as Bora Zivkovic defined it.) I for example am a beat-expert: I focus on science, environment, and space journalism. I regularly commission articles from freelancers, among whom there are generalists and beat-experts as well. The generalists here will be comfortable covering a variety of topics (often as long the subject matter in each case isn’t too involved) whereas the beat-experts might be restricted to, say, RNA viruses, radio astronomy, solar power economics or number theory. Even at the newsroom level, there are generalist reporters who can hammer out news reports with all the right details in the right order and beat reporters who are better equipped to dive deep into specific topics.

    Notably, however, beat-experts are generally valued more. There are a few reasons why. Beat-experts can if required competently put together a copy on a completely different beat; depending on the beat, they can be hard to come by; and — this is perhaps most important — by virtue of understanding a topic more deeply than others, they can communicate ideas and developments therein much better. It’s even better if through one’s work as a journalist one is able to bring together the “two cultures” à la CP Snow, that is to draw on insights and wisdom from both science and the humanities to inform the way one covers different subjects. Then one’s value will soar (assuming there are also editors or employers that are able to discern that value).

    In the last week alone, in fact, my regret over having spent four years studying the physics and mathematics underlying engineering has been significantly mitigated by the particular events in the news. Air India flight AI171 crashed shortly after take-off in Ahmedabad, killing 241 of the 242 people onboard and concluding as one of India’s worst air disasters. To quote from my piece in The Hindu, “The engine design is an important reason for 787-8 aircraft’s higher fuel-efficiency per seat… The other factors contributing to this feature include the use of carbon composite structures of lower weight and low-drag aerodynamics. [Thus] a 787-8 aircraft burnt around 20% less fuel than earlier twinjet models of a similar size. This allowed the aircraft to undertake nonstop flights between cities with lower passenger traffic than that required to fill Boeing 777 or Boeing 747 aircraft.” Depending on what investigators find from the black box, there’s a nontrivial chance one of these three components was part of the cascade of problems leading up to the crash, and may in turn reveal the processual failures that preceded it.

    The Axiom-4 commercial mission to the International Space Station was delayed for a fourth time before SpaceX called it off altogether following a gas leak onboard the rocket. The engineering factor here is less obvious, especially as it relates to a curious statement ISRO issued on June 13: that ISRO had recommended to SpaceX that the latter — the company that actually built the rocket for the mission and has flown it hundreds of times before — “carry out in-situ repairs or replacement and conduct a low-temperature leak test to validate system performance and integrity, before proceeding with launch clearance”. ISRO may not be lying but why, given how rockets are tested and certified for flight, would SpaceX care for ISRO’s opinion on the way forward here?

    Last: Israel launched what it called a “preliminary” attack against Iran in order to dissuade it from pursuing its nuclear weapons programme. The attack followed a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency resolved that Iran had failed to comply with the terms of a 1974 agreement that, among other things, demanded the country be accountable at all times about the use of enriched uranium for civilian v. military applications. Now, I’ve been interested in nuclear news from around the world since a brief interaction with MV Ramana more than a decade ago, but my background in engineering — which I was now forced to dust off and retrieve from the recesses of my mind — certainly helped lubricate my comprehension of uranium enrichment. And that in turn revealed like little else could how rapidly Iran was advancing towards possessing nuclear warheads, how and why the IAEA safeguards are limited (and why Iran’s willing participation in inspectors’ surveillance is so important), and ultimately why Israel is so nervous.

    Broadly, having a degree in X field and getting into Y field confronts you more often than otherwise with situations where you’re forced to learn on the fly, using your own mental models but often with models you’ve acquired learning something entirely different. In my case at least, this switch allowed me to think about certain ideas in ways that others weren’t. English literature followed by journalism could have had the same effect, although I only know that in hindsight. Just like I was forced to adapt engineering thinking to social issues and vice versa, English literature, which is after all a literary window into history, certain geographies, certain peoples, and the writers, readers, philosophers, and politicians among them, could allow one to compare/contrast whatever is happening today around us with what we know did in the past — an exercise I’ve always found to be illuminating.

    (Edit: my friend Chitralekha Manohar helped me see that I also presumed a certain willingness to learn in order for an X-to-Y switch to manifest all its benefits. Chitralekha is a professional editor who runs The Clean Copy in Bengaluru. As she put it: “What I mean to say is, it’s very easy for an English literature student to find science writing by a scientist to be boring. But I really like it. And it might have something to do with a personal project to understand language and communication at a level more than is necessary to get the degree. It’s the recurring question of why some of us are like this…”.)

    Engineering offers yet another lens through which to observe the world as long the observer doesn’t lose sight of everything else, especially the social, political, economic, etc. aspects. This is hardly new information but perhaps the corollary is: all these other lenses through which to observe the world may also offer an incomplete picture if they overlook what engineering is uniquely equipped to reveal. Of course I presume here a particular kind of engineering education: learning the basics of physics, chemistry, and mathematics followed by specialised training in the principles and techniques of the specific ‘branch’, i.e. mechanical, chemical, biotechnological, electrical, software, etc.

    In fact, I grudgingly admit that even though I barely cleared all these papers, the residues of lessons on calculus, metrology, vector algebra, fuzzy logic, and so on have sufficed to maintain a picture in my mind of how the world works and, importantly, how it can’t, won’t or shouldn’t — although defining these three boundaries also demands political awareness and a sense of social justice. Thus for example one becomes able to spot pseudoscience but also understands that sometimes it needs to be treated with compassion if for no other reason than that it was born of the failure of science to meet particular human needs.

    More broadly, materialism has historically exerted a sizeable influence on human societies, their institutions, and their aspirations, and continues to do so. As a result, to go back to the engineer and communist Chavez, “the social relations tying global industry together are obscured underneath an engineering methodology”. Even for its contemporary identity as a “bourgeois science”, then, the engineer’s enterprise is arguably necessary if we’re to retool human industry.

    Closer home, I think I’m finally not resenting those four years.

  • 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.