Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: NASA

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Empathy for Donald Pettit

    There was an intriguing outpouring of concern worldwide when Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore returned to Earth after 280-something days in space. People were particularly concerned about Williams’s health and how she was doing, as if Wilmore hadn’t been there with her living through the same mission.

    Researchers are still studying the effects of prolonged spaceflight on human bodies and don’t yet have enough data to say with confidence that some effects are more pronounced in women’s bodies. More than a few astronauts have also flown longer missions. NASA also has exercise and medical check-up regimens in place for astronauts to follow during long-duration missions as well as once they return to the ground. Taken together, while the mission profile was unusual, the duo didn’t present NASA with challenges it didn’t already know how to address.

    Williams likely received the attention she did because she is more popular and, in some parts of the world, for her Indian ancestry. Other than her being a veteran astronaut, a NASA scientist, and a good ambassador for human spaceflight, I don’t think she’s special in a way that could justify the world’s, including India’s, tunnel vision.

    In fact, while there was considerable interest in the astronauts’ well-being onboard the International Space Station (ISS) after their original mission profile had been stretched from eight days to nine months, the world has a much better case study to focus on now — yet few seem bothered.

    On April 20 (IST), Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut Donald “Don” Pettit returned from the ISS onboard a Soyuz capsule on its MS-26 mission. Of them, Pettit turned 70 years old today. He is NASA’s oldest active astronaut. His most recent ISS expedition lasted 220 days and so far he has accumulated 590 days in space.

    When the Soyuz MS-26 capsule touched down in Kazakhstan, NASA tweeted:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Here’s the April 16 interview, where you can also listen to him talking about what the first thing he’s likely to do once he lands: poop. “It affects different people different ways,” he goes on to say about long space stays. “Some people can land and go out, eat pizza, and dance. When I land, it takes me about 24 hours to feel like I’m a human being again.”

    According to Russian journalist (and a good source of spaceflight details coming out of that country) Anatoly Zak, Pettit didn’t look good coming out of the Soyuz capsule.

    That cameras at the landing were asked to point away from Pettit because he was in “bad shape” is so wholesome. Jonathan McDowell put it in terms we’d understand:

    Right now, Williams, Wilmore, and Pettit will be going through NASA’s physical and mental rehabilitation programme for astronauts wrapping up long-term missions (as defined by NASA’s Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer). It will last for at least 45 days and will be extended if an astronaut needs more help.

    Once the rehabilitation is done, it will be good to hear from Williams, Wilmore, and Pettit about their missions. I do hope they will speak up and NASA will allow them to be candid.

    A few weeks ago, Ars Technica published an article based on an intimate interview with Barry Wilmore. Both the fact of the article being published and the details that populated it were evidence of good journalism. But I’d rather astronauts who have been on such high-profile missions share all the details they’re allowed to with everyone in a public forum and that their government employers facilitate such interactions. This way what the people find out about doesn’t depend on which questions they already know to ask.

    Of course, health possesses a tricky identity in this information landscape. I’m reminded of an article journalist Anoo Bhuyan wrote in 2018, after Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan revealed he had been diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumour. In one evocative passage, Bhuyan laid out the starkly different ways in which Bollywood stars and Indian political leaders addressed public concerns about their medical state.

    Bollywood celebrities have no responsibility to be accountable to the public about their health. Yet, they have often been transparent. However, same cannot be said about Indian politicians across parties and across the country. Sonia Gandhi, J. Jayalalithaa, Manohar Parrikar, Sushma Swaraj, Amar Singh and a number of other prominent figures have all been and continue to be tight-lipped about their health. More importantly, they are unaccountable about their inability to perform the jobs for which they were elected.

    The empathetic coverage of Pettit as he exited the Soyuz capsule struck an edifying contrast with a lot of media coverage of Sunita Williams that sought details about her health that, should anyone have acquired them, would have constituted a violation of her privacy.

    At the same time, human spaceflight is becoming an increasingly prominent preoccupation of many countries. It is both very expensive and, the way it is organised in India (guided as much by political ambitions as by scientific ones and with rarely proactive outreach), is hard to hold accountable.

    What astronauts as prominent as Williams, Wilmore, and Pettit say — who are also experienced in ways that few others are — will go a long way towards allowing anyone with an internet connection to participate, learn, and keep up rather than become disengaged and left behind.

    Yet the simple fact of an astronaut being a public figure doesn’t mean all their personal details should be availed for public consumption.

    Shatrugan Sinha’s advice, as he provided it in Bhuyan’s article, is fitting here: that anyone should be able to share information about their ailments without fear of being removed from their current posts and of being discriminated against for it. The former is currently easier because it is techne — determined by the technical prowess of the times to cure a disease or ‘remove’ a condition’ — while the latter is harder for being episteme, a way of thinking and thus more firmly enmeshed In the mores of the time. Perhaps political leaders are tight-lipped because they know this better than anyone. It is nonetheless unfortunate.

    Astronauts are more like film stars here: they owe us no accountability about how they are faring, but if they do elect to share, it can go a long away towards destigmatising the public perception of their work as well as understand what astronauts everywhere, including budding ones at home, are expected to go through.

    Featured image: Astronaut Donald Pettit uses a camera during extra-vehicular activity on the International Space Station (ISS), January 15, 2003. Credit: NASA.

  • 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.

  • On the US FAA’s response to Falcon 9 debris

    On February 1, SpaceX launched its Starlink 11-4 mission onboard a Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket’s reusable first stage returned safely to the ground and the second stage remained in orbit after deploying the Starlink satellites. It was to deorbit later in a controlled procedure and land somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. But on February 19 it was seen breaking up in the skies over Denmark, England, Poland, and Sweden, with some larger pieces crashing into parts of Poland. After the Polish space agency determined the debris to belong to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was asked about its liability. This was its response:

    The FAA determined that all flight events for the SpaceX Starlink 11-4 mission occurred within the scope of SpaceX’s licensed activities and that SpaceX satisfied safety at end-of-launch requirements. Per post-launch reporting requirements, SpaceX must identify any discrepancy or anomaly that occurred during the launch to the FAA within 90-days. The FAA has not identified any events that should be classified as a mishap at this time. Licensed flight activities and FAA oversight concluded upon SpaceX’s last exercise of control over the Falcon 9 vehicle. SpaceX posted information on its website that the second stage from this launch reentered over Europe. The FAA is not investigating the uncontrolled reentry of the second stage nor the debris found in Poland.

    I’ve spotted a lot of people on the internet (not trolls) describing this response as being in line with Donald Trump’s “USA first” attitude and reckless disregard for the consequences of his government’s actions and policies on other countries. It’s understandable given how his meeting with Zelenskyy on February 28 played out as well as NASA acting administrator Janet Petro’s disgusting comment about US plans to “dominate” lunar and cislunar space. However, the FAA’s position has been unchanged since at least August 18, 2023, when it issued a “notice of proposed rulemaking” designated 88 FR 56546. Among other things:

    The proposed rule would … update definitions relating to commercial space launch and reentry vehicles and occupants to reflect current legislative definitions … as well as implement clarifications to financial responsibility requirements in accordance with the United States Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act.

    Under Section 401.5 2(i), the notice stated:

    (1) Beginning of launch. (i) Under a license, launch begins with the arrival of a launch vehicle or payload at a U.S. launch site.

    The FAA’s position has likely stayed the same for some duration before the August 2023 date. According to Table 1 in the notice, the “effect of change” of the clarification of the term “Launch”, under which Section 401.5 2(i) falls, is:

    None. The FAA has been applying these definitions in accordance with the statute since the [US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act 2015] went into effect. This change would now provide regulatory clarity.

    Skipping back bit further, the FAA issued a “final rule” on “Streamlined Launch and Reentry License Requirements” on September 30, 2020. The rule states (pp. 680-681) under Section 450.1 (b) 3:

    (i) For an orbital launch of a vehicle without a reentry of the vehicle, launch ends after the licensee’s last exercise of control over its vehicle on orbit, after vehicle component impact or landing on Earth, after activities necessary to return the vehicle or component to a safe condition on the ground after impact or landing, or after activities necessary to return the site to a safe condition, whichever occurs latest;

    (ii) For an orbital launch of a vehicle with a reentry of the vehicle, launch ends after deployment of all payloads, upon completion of the vehicle’s first steady-state orbit if there is no payload deployment, after vehicle component impact or landing on Earth, after activities necessary to return the vehicle or component to a safe condition on the ground after impact or landing, or after activities necessary to return the site to a safe condition, whichever occurs latest; …

    In part B of this document, under the heading “Detailed Discussion of the Final Rule” and further under the sub-heading “End of Launch”, the FAA presents the following discussion:

    [Commercial Spaceflight Federation] and SpaceX suggested that orbital launch without a reentry in proposed §450.3(b)(3)(i) did not need to be separately defined by the regulation, stating that, regardless of the type of launch, something always returns: Boosters land or are disposed, upper stages are disposed. CSF and SpaceX further requested that the FAA not distinguish between orbital and suborbital vehicles for end of launch.

    The FAA does not agree because the distinctions in § 450.3(b)(3)(i) and (ii) are necessary due to the FAA’s limited authority on orbit. For a launch vehicle that will eventually return to Earth as a reentry vehicle, its on-orbit activities after deployment of its payload or payloads, or completion of the vehicle’s first steady-state orbit if there is no payload, are not licensed by the FAA. In addition, the disposal of an upper stage is not a reentry under 51 U.S.C. Chapter 509, because the upper stage does not return to Earth substantially intact.

    From 51 USC Chapter 509, Section 401.7:

    Reentry vehicle means a vehicle designed to return from Earth orbit or outer space to Earth substantially intact. A reusable launch vehicle that is designed to return from Earth orbit or outer space to Earth substantially intact is a reentry vehicle.

    This means Section 450.1 (b) 3(i) under “Streamlined Launch and Reentry License Requirements” of 2020 applies to the uncontrolled deorbiting of the Falcon 9 upper stage in the Starlink 11-4 mission. In particular, according to the FAA, the launch ended “after the licensee’s last exercise of control over its vehicle on orbit”, which was the latest relevant event.

    Back to the “Detailed Discussion of the Final Rule”:

    Both CSF and SpaceX proposed “end of launch” should be defined on a case-by-case basis in pre-application consultation and specified in the license. The FAA disagrees, in part. The FAA only regulates on a case-by-case basis if the nature of an activity makes it impossible for the FAA to promulgate rules of general applicability. This need has not arisen, as evidenced by decades of FAA oversight of end-of-launch activities. That said, because the commercial space transportation industry continues to innovate, §450.3(a) gives the FAA the flexibility to adjust the scope of license, including end of launch, based on unique circumstances as agreed to by the Administrator.

    The world currently doesn’t have a specific international law or agreement dealing with accountability for space debris that crashes to the earth, including paying for the damages such debris wreaks and imposing penalties on offending launch operators. In light of this fact, it’s important to remember the FAA’s position — even if it seems disagreeable — has been unchanged for some time even as it has regularly updated its rulemaking to accommodate private sector innovation within the spirit of the existing law.

    Trump is an ass and I’m not holding out for him to look out for the concerns of other countries when pieces of made-in-USA rockets descend in uncontrolled fashion over their territories, damaging property or even taking lives. But that the FAA didn’t develop its present position afresh under Trump 2.0, and that it was really developed with feedback from SpaceX and other US-based spaceflight operators, is important to understand that its attitude towards crashing debris goes beyond ideology, encompassing the support of both Democrat and Republican governments over the years.

  • Let’s allow space missions to be wonderful

    Finally some external validation. After months of insisting Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore aren’t “stuck” or “stranded” in the International Space Station, after Boeing Starliner’s first crewed flight test went awry, the two astronauts have themselves repudiated the use of such words to describe their mission profile so far. On February 18, Moneycontrol quoted a CNN report to say:

    In an interview with CNN, Wilmore said they are neither abandoned nor stuck. “We come prepared and committed,” he stated, adding that all ISS astronauts have emergency return options. Williams also reflected on their space experience, saying, “Floating in space never gets old.”

    Williams’s statement isn’t bravado just much as the use of “stranded” isn’t a matter of describing what’s right in front of us. Crewed missions to space are always more complicated than that. That’s why Boeing picked Williams and Wilmore in the first place: they’re veteran astronauts who know when not to panic. To quote from a previous post:

    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?

    … “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.

    Narratives matter. Words don’t always describe only what the senses can perceive. Certain words, including “stuck” and “stranded”, also impute intentions, motive, and agency — which are things we can’t piece together without involving the people to whom we are attributing these things (while ensuring they have the ability and opportunity to speak up). Wilmore says he’s “committed”, not “stuck”. When Williams says “floating in space never gets old”, it means among other things that she’s allowed to define her journey in that way without only navigating narratives in which she’s “stranded”.

    In fact, as we make more forays into space — whether specific tasks like taking a brand new crew capsule for its first spin, guiding robots into previously uncharted areas of space or ourselves going where only robots have been before — we need to stay open to the unexpected and we need to keep ready a language that doesn’t belittle or diminish the human experience of it, which by all means can be completely wonderful.

    Finally, I support restricting our language to what’s right in front of us in the event that we don’t know, which would be to simply say they’re in space.

    Featured image: This image combines data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with an image previously released by the James Webb Space Telescope of the NGC 602 star cluster. The ring-like outline of the wreath seen in Webb data (in orange, yellow, green, and blue) is made up of dense clouds of dust. X-rays (red) emitted by young, massive stars illuminate the wreath. 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.