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.