Mangalyaan-1 (and ISRO) in Perspective - Abhaey Singh ================================ It took dozens of US, European and Soviet missions and tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to FAIL to conclusively confirm what India did in its sole Lunar mission in 2008/9 - at first attempt, and for less money than it takes to make a Hollywood movie: confirm the presence of water on the moon. ISRO, today, has again furnished us with a little piece of history, with India becoming the first country to have both reached and successfully placed into orbit a spacecraft around Mars at first attempt - and that too using her own indigenously developed technology (US and Soviet/Russian rockets trace their ancestry to rip-offs of German V2s, and Chinese rockets to Soviet hand-me-downs). In addition to being a colossal technological and scientific feat, Mangalyaan-1’s success has a suitably karmic twist to it; the rocket that should have launched Mangalyaan is called the GSLV – in essence a ‘heavy-lift’ part-cryogenic rocket best suited to interplanetary missions such as this. However, over the past two decades, Indias GSLV programme has been hit by the mysterious deaths of our brightest cryogenic technology scientists. Because of these murders and the broader sabotage of the GSLV programme, ISRO decided to march ahead with Mangalyaan-1 regardless, using the ‘lighter-lift’ PSLV rocket instead, but through a much more complex route out of Earth’s gravitational pull. It succeeded to do so, in record time, and again at first attempt. If you read (some) Western coverage about ISRO and Mangalyaan, other than cringing at how predictably petty and small-minded some of it is, you won’t easily be able to appreciate the bigger picture – or the finer details - that really matters in our understanding of India’s space programme; additionally, the high profile nature of the Mars / Moon and impending Sun missions actually serve to obscure an understanding of the prized gem that ISRO truly is. The article below was therefore written, at the time of Mangalayaan-1’s launch, to provide an easily accessible five-minute summary of what ISRO actually stands for, and why she is so important not just to India, but to poverty alleviation, human development and day-to-day service provision well beyond India’s borders; it is tailor-written for those who may be tired of seeing ISRO’s successes reduced to the patronising banality of a ‘space race’, or the mindlessness of ‘superfluity for a developing nation’. huffingtonpost.co.uk/abhaey-singh/indias-space-programme_b_4371027.html
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 04:46:32 +0000
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