(The article was first published in Vijay Times, 28 January 2007).
A little over a year ago, Indian Space Research Organisation Director Madhavan Nair started a debate on whether India can achieve its space objectives by continuing with unmanned, robotic missions alone or whether manned missions are necessary. In October, Nair made a presentation to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seeking approval and budgets for a manned space flight.
Ten days ago, the ISRO demonstrated that it is capable of recovering spacecraft after launching them into high orbit -- an important step towards being able to send astronauts aboard such spacecraft and return them safely to earth.
Now, the debate stands recast - it is no longer whether to undertake manned missions or not, but what type of missions to undertake, and towards what long-term goal. Since this debate is far from settled, however, it is important to understand the context in which this rapid change in attitudes and ambitions is occurring, and whether you should be voting ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘can’t say’ in the polls that newspapers, television channels and websites will throw up in the coming months even as the nation eagerly awaits the prime minister’s approval for manned space flight.
First, there is the larger geopolitical and strategic context. Already, the US, China, Japan, Russia and the European Space Agency have all embarked on ambitious space programmes. Indeed, the US has announced that it will return to the lunar surface by 2020; Japan plans to conduct moon landing by 2020 and build a permanent lunar base; Russia is building a space shuttle called ‘Kliper’ on which it expects to send man to the moon; the European Space Agency is planning to land man on the moon by 2025 and on Mars by 2033; China, our neighbour and fellow developing country, plans to land man on the moon before 2020.
Undoubtedly, there are narrow considerations of political prestige, even plain vanity of politicians and the scientific community driving these plans. But there are also far more critical realities.
For one, there are a new set of rising powers in the post-Cold War world that want the world to acknowledge them and give them their due. China and India are, of course, the most talked about of these rising powers, but there is also the often bumbling-stumbling European Union and a resurgent Russia.
In the pre-nuclear era, rising powers made demands and, when existing great powers did not concede them, went to war to achieve them -- as Germany and Japan did. But at a time when all the world’s major powers possess nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, going to war to signal one’s arrival on the global stage is not an option for the rising powers.
In these circumstances, there are few national achievements that a nation can undertake to obtain, by peaceful means, the world’s acknowledgement of its status in the international hierarchy.
America faced a similar situation following the launch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957 - it could not go to war with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, yet had to prove itself to its European allies and to the world at large. The Lunar Expedition Plan of May 1961, based on which President Kennedy announced the decision to go to the moon by the end of that decade, said it eloquently: ‘‘This one achievement, if accomplished before the USSR, will serve to demonstrate conclusively that this nation possesses the capability to win future competition in technology. No space achievement short of this goal will have equal technological significance, historic impact, or excite the entire world.” But there is an even more grounded, and increasingly urgent, reason why the world’s industrial powers want to send men to the moon. In a recent study, researchers from Yale University found that there was not enough stock of metals such as platinum on the earth to cater to global demand. They warned that ‘‘there is a direct relation between requisite stock (of metals), standard of living and technology in use at a given time.” This scarcity of metals -- and of other resources, especially fuel -- is only going to become acute, as China and India grow industrially and their two billionplus people increasingly aspire for the living standards achieved by the West.
Thus, key Asian and African resources will become increasingly scarce or prohibitively expensive for the industrial powers that have enjoyed cheap and easy access to them for centuries, as well as for China and India themselves.
Meanwhile, the globalisation and commercialisation of space have caused a continuous fall in the costs of space launch (cost per kg in orbit), while technological advances are driving gains in capability per kg in orbit. Due to this combination of rising costs of obtaining resources on the earth and the falling costs of space transportation, the idea of exploiting space in general, and the moon’s resources in particular, has started to appeal to governments.
The moon is certainly a good place -rocky, mineral-rich and unexplored territory -- to look for some metals, minerals and fuels that are scarce on the earth and for others that can be found only on the moon. Indeed, mineral exploration is the stated objective of all the lunar missions that have been announced, including India’s unmanned “Chandrayaan”.
Russian aerospace corporation Energia also intends to produce helium3 -- an isotope rare on the earth -- on an industrial scale on the moon where it is available in plenty and transport it to the earth by a heavy-cargo link for use in future thermonuclear reactors.
None of these plans can be achieved through robotic missions alone, no matter what technological advances are made in the next 50 years. Not surprisingly, therefore, the other space powers are neither debating whether or not there is a need for manned missions nor are they talking of sending humans on one-time shots for fame and glory. Their plans are centered around the need to establish permanent manned lunar bases.
India cannot afford to be left behind in this race if it aspires to become one of the top powers of the world. If you are still not convinced, consider the alternative: We have been playing catch-up with the West for over 60 years.
If we don’t raise our ambitions and make an effort to achieve the highest goals now, we will end up playing catchup to even China for the next hundred years. That will be a tragedy. At least, the West had a lead of more than a hundred years over us and so it is acceptable that we are trying to catch up with it. But it will be a shame if we have to catch up with China which after all started from a lower base than India.
