Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: Shubhanshu Shukla

  • 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.

  • To be Indian is to set records

    For all the ways in which the Indian people are divided these days, they’re seemingly united in their desire to set records. On January 22, a tinkerer named Sohan Rai, a.k.a. “Zikiguy”, said on Instagram that he and his team “are planning to do India’s highest ever flag hoist in near space for this Republic Day”.

    What is it about setting records? The national BJP government itself, which — from the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi was first elected — has tried repeatedly to extend the record books backwards into mythology, asserting ancient Indians piloted interplanetary aircraft and performed plastic surgery millennia before the advent of modern science. But recasting religious metaphors like the elephant-headed god Ganesha as literal medical feats only reveals the ideology’s own neurosis to validate Indian heritage using the yardstick of modern Western empiricism. It’s practically a retroactive attempt at record-setting where the leadership, admitting it can’t dominate the prevailing global hierarchy, simply imagines India to have been the original superpower.

    The 2016 Tamil film Joker brought the same pathos to clearer light through its protagonist, Mannar Mannan (Tamil for “king of kings”), who abandons democratic petitioning and other mechanisms in favour of performing absurdity — much as farmers from Tamil Nadu did when they protested in Delhi in 2017 by holding dead rats and snakes in their mouths — to draw the state’s attention. The state, the thinking seems to be, has become inured to ‘normal’ poverty and will only react to spectacular embarrassment.

    The Limca Book of Records is a symbol of this syndrome. The then Parle-Bisleri chairman Ramesh Chauhan conceived of the book in 1986 and first published it in 1990 as an extension of the ‘Limca’ brand, as a tool of “soft” marketing. That it exists at all is because Indians alone are setting so many records, even those bordering on the facile. Today the Limca Book is the second-oldest of its kind in the world, after the Guinness Book, and accepts applications from Indians worldwide provided they hold an Indian passport — a requirement that reveals how both citizenship and record-setting are equally emblematic of being Indian.

    A ‘record’ is an event that documents primacy through some extreme act, and the extremum can take different forms depending on what sort of primacy one wishes to establish. Prime Minister Narendra Modi built the world’s tallest statue in Gujarat and Maharashtra responded by promising a taller one because the BJP was engaging in a pissing contest and the other was furthering the same stunted logic by contending that one didn’t have to be a nationalist to piss higher, for instance.

    More recently, when astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla first went to space onboard the Axiom-4 mission, various media outlets reported that he’d set a record by becoming the first Indian to conduct an experiment in space. By that measure, Indians have scores of records left to set, including becoming the first Indian to cough in space, the first Indian to get out of the right side of bed in space, and the first Indian in space whose name starts with ‘M’. But hey, it’s technically a record, and it’s printed, and if it’s printed it must be true.

    In his work, the historian Vinay Lal has argued that the Indian obsession with the Guinness Book is rooted in a deep-seated postcolonial disquiet. He’s posited that the colonial experience left India with a sense of “historical incompleteness” because the West had come to be seen as the world’s standard-bearer of modernity and ‘hard facts’. In his telling, Indians also have a “fetish for numbers” because in a chaotic and often unmanageable democracy, precise numbers — e.g. “typing 103 characters in 47 seconds with a nose” — offer the comfort of certainty and empirical truths, and which also feel scientific.

    Records also allow these ordinary persons to be heroes. While achievements like Olympic gold medals and Nobel Prizes require state funding, favourable (and arguably arbitrary) social conditions, political stability, and training/research hardware, the Guinness and Limca records often demand only time and a high tolerance for discomfort. This is why many Indian records are feats of endurance or body modification, such as “longest fingernails” or “most time spent standing on one leg”, rather than exercises of athleticism or brilliance.

    The Indian state itself isn’t immune to the same tendencies. For example, the sociologist Shiv Visvanathan has written that the state uses such records to replace complex historical narratives with crude statistics. Thus we have a prime minister focusing on the number of people simultaneously doing yoga rather than engaging with its philosophy in any meaningful sense. The Union health ministry advanced a similarly pathetic claim during the COVID-19 pandemic when it said it was conducting the “world’s largest vaccination drive”, betraying its real design: to create a spectacle to unify the mob and to project an image of power and efficiency to mask infrastructural and social weaknesses.

    Of course when the people themselves take advantage of their numbers to set records, it’s just quaintly saddening. As Samanth Subramanian reported for The New York Times in 2015:

    The first time Nikhil Shukla adjudicated a Guinness world record, two million people turned up. Standing on a makeshift dais just before dawn in January 2012, Shukla gazed with bleary, incredulous eyes; he was 28, and he had never seen such a mammoth crowd in his life. Tolls on the national highway from the nearest city, Rajkot, had been suspended to accommodate the traffic, and Shukla had to trudge 20 minutes from his V.I.P. parking spot, squeezing through dense thickets of bodies, to approach the stage. The throng that gathered in this patch of dusty farmland in western India to watch the event came from villages and towns across the district. They had responded to a call from a Gujarati community organization that, with a vague aim of promoting public harmony, wanted people to pair off and shake hands with one another, setting a world record for the most simultaneous handshakes.

    All this is to say that the Indian affinity for records isn’t benign or innocent but is nurtured by an unresolved postcolonial identity that still looks to the West, or Western ideals, to certify its own reality. In this universe the Indian citizen resorts to obscure feats of endurance as a desperate attempt to become visible even as an increasingly authoritarian state exploits this pathos to its own ends.

    As for what Sohan Rai is going to attempt: he’s bypassing the elite barriers to the space programme, since he can’t yet be an astronaut himself; he’s internalised the state’s performance of power by enacting in miniature the quest for legitimacy using gigantism (thus rendering himself very visible in the process); and by attaching an altitude number to the hoist he’s seeking to convert the abstract sentiment of national pride into an empirical ‘truth’ that can be recorded.

    Sure, there are some reasons to be optimistic: in the course of attempting this record, Rai will (I assume) step beyond simply enduring discomfort and solve important problems in atmospheric physics, telemetry, the behaviour of materials in the stratosphere, and so on. The problem is I’m not sure what all that could amount to other than also legitimising the state’s own devices to distract the people from their anxieties.

  • 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.

  • 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.