With the initial euphoria of the success of India’s moon mission settling down, time has come to reflect on what exactly it gave and what it will continue to give to India. First and foremost, it proved that India is amongst the best as far as the business of space is concerned. With this mission it entered an exclusive club of nations that can send missions to deep space, over a distance of more than a lakh kilometres. The mission’s success has not only forced the entire world to take notice of India’s achievements in the field but also demonstrated the fact that there are cost-effective ways even to reach the moon.After Chandrayaan-1, India’s first moon satellite was successfully launched into an initial elliptical orbit around the earth by PSLV-C11 on October 22, 2008, doubts were expressed in certain quarters that how successful India could be in actually reaching towards the moon. Some Chinese websites, for example, insisted that India was misleading the world about its achievements and the mission was actually unlikely to succeed. (There was no reaction from ISRO.) But then, till November 14, every day was crucial for the scientists working at ISRO, for various reasons. Their first major task was to raise the satellite’s orbit from an initial height of approximately 22,000 km to the phenomenal distance of more than 3,83,000 km. Subsequently, they were to play the “game of gravity”: which they succeeded at, as the spacecraft broke away from the earth’s gravitational field entered the moon’s gravity instead. On that day, November 14, a Moon Impact Probe (MIP), with the Indian flag painted on it was dropped on the moon’s surface, marking the effective culmination of the project’s first phase. ISRO’s response to criticism came in the form of fascinating pictures of the moon’s surface taken by its terrain-mapping camera. The coming two years are very critical for this extended mission. Ten sensors on board Chandrayaan-1 are going to produce huge amounts of data, structured both as pictures and as digital information. This would be used for a mineralogical mapping of the moon, and to search for water on its surface. A three-dimensional atlas of the moon would thus be created; and the answer to questions about the availability of helium-3, which some believe might unlock the secrets of cheaper energy, is expected to emerge from this data analysis. So, what next? ISRO has actually developed a very clear-cut roadmap. The launch of Chandrayaan-2 is scheduled for 2010-11, with Russian collaboration: as part of the mission, a robot is to be dropped on the moon’s surface that will carry out real-time analysis of soil samples. Subsequently, an unmanned craft is to land on the moon’s surface; and, as soon as 2015-20, a human visit to the moon might even be possible. Indeed, plans to start an institute to train astronauts for the moon have been drawn up. And, as for cost: ISRO spends 85 per cent of its $1 billion budget on development-related missions, and the remaining 15 per cent on advanced research and development, and on missions such as Chandrayaan. Given that, criticism that ISRO is wasting money on such projects is hard to justify.Today, a debate is also underway about this mission’s strategic relevance. It is important to understand that the word strategic should not be myopically given only military connotations. The correct strategic argument might be the following: space missions never give immediate results, they are an ongoing process, and will have far-reaching impact on various fields of life, say, two to three decades hence.On the other hand, space technology is rapidly emerging as a frontline technology, because of its wide civilian and military applications. States are increasingly looking at it as one of the most important tools to address 21st-century challenges. In the last two to three decades, an increasing number of states have needed to use space technologies to implement their policies and programmes. During the many years that Indian scientists were working on this first moon mission, they also succeeded in validating various new technologies. Such offshoot technologies are likely to find uses in both the civilian and the military worlds.In the 21st century India is attempting to move from being an industrial age power to being an information age power. Post-nuclear India understands that a brazen display of military strength has limitations. It is political, economic and technological power which is going to help it to ascertain its “soft power” status; the moon mission is one part of that attempt. The write researches non-traditional threats to national security at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, Delhiexpress@expressindia.com
