On February 1, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman delivered the Union budget for 2020-2021, during which she announced an allocation of Rs 13,479.47 crore for the Department of Space (DOS). This is a 7.5% increase from last year – but a 45.2% increase relative to the allocation in 2015-2016. This signals India’s increasing, and continued, commitment to space activities.
Note that the Government of India has already approved a budget of Rs 10,911 crore for the construction of 30 Polar Satellite Launch Vehicles (PSLVs) and 10 Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicles (GSLVs), and Rs 10,000 crore for the country’s maiden human spaceflight mission, ‘Gaganyaan’, which aims to send three astronauts to space.
Indeed, ISRO has been drawing from the success of its interplanetary missions to broaden its horizons and set up a Human Spaceflight Centre (HSFC) to train astronauts in a new campus in Karnataka’s Challakere, increase the number of Space Situational Awareness (SSA) projects (including Project NETRA) and to set up a dedicated control centre for SSA.
K. Sivan, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), said at a recent press conference that the space agency intends to undertake 25 missions in 2020. Some of the more interesting among them, as well as other developments, include the launch of ISRO’s new Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) to capture the emerging global small-satellites market; an effort to get back to the lunar surface with Chandrayaan 3; preparations for Gaganyaan; the establishment of a new launch pad in Kulasekarapattinam, in Tamil Nadu, to ease SSLV launches; and the launch of Aditya 1, India’s first space mission to study the Sun.
Interestingly, the NewSpace India, Ltd. (NSIL) – the public sector enterprise setup by the government to commercialise ISRO products – was given Rs 10 crore last year but nothing this budget. A.S. Kiran Kumar, Sivan’s predecessor at the helm of ISRO, had indicated three years ago that ISRO was exploring a consortium via a joint venture to build enough launch vehicles to support 24 launches a year. In retrospect, ISRO managed to conduct only six PSLV launches in 2019 and rented an Arianespace rocket to fly a geostationary satellite, instead of using a GSLV. So it looks like there hasn’t been much progress since Kumar’s statement, and this year’s allocation to NSIL suggests that the DOS has not made any concrete decisions about using NSIL to develop a joint effort with industry to augment India’s launch capacity.
Additionally, in October 2018, ISRO announced a roadmap to launch 50 satellites in a three-year period. The number of missions conducted in 2019 clearly indicates the lack of production capabilities within ISRO to support the burgeoning demand in the country for space-based services. Given the indifference towards making timely and strategic decisions towards creating an ecosystem of industry players that can augment the capacity, ISRO should perhaps consider tripling its workforce and increasing its in-house infrastructure to meet the demand by itself.
China has taken just this approach and today, state-owned and operated entities drive all major requirements. As a result, they were able to increase the number of launches to nearly 40 per year in 2018 from six in 2009. The same goes for supply-chain problems in realising enough satellites for all needs including weather, remote sensing, navigation, communications, science and experimental missions.
Another count on which we need to have some progress – and soon – is the formalisation of specific missions of the Defence Space Agency (DSA) and the Defence Space Research Organisation, which the government announced last year. The DSA is expected to employ 200 personnel together with existing capabilities in the Defence Imagery Processing and Analysis Centre, New Delhi, and the Defence Satellite Control Centre, Bhopal. However, the budget itself presented no more information nor do we know any mission timelines for these entities, conceived in an attempt to modernise the Indian armed forces with the integration of space technology.
Overall, the Government of India has been very supportive of the space programme and its ability to develop applications for society. However, the DOS has not been able to effectively address the problem of production to keep up with demand. Together with the fact that there have been no bold steps in increasing private sector participation in the space programme, the government should consider increasing both personnel and infrastructure instead. This seems to be the only way out as long as we also desire a balance between having the ability to focus on new technologies for spaceflight and having to undertake run-of-the-mill production of established space systems.
Narayan Prasad is the host of the NewSpace India podcast, India’s only talk show focused on space activities.
A new book makes the case for why India’s policymakers must approach space security in interdisciplinary, not piecemeal, fashion.
Final Frontier, a new book by Bharath Gopalaswamy, a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, begins by introducing space security through the lens of national security, and how space became an important part of it. Gopalaswamy uses examples from various leading space actors from the early years of space activities to build the case for why space security should matter to India.
The first few chapters provide an excellent overview of the origins of the Indian space programme, especially in terms of its organisational and programmatic development, followed by a detailed account of the structure of the different centres of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The reader is bound to come away with strong insights into the capacity built up in the country over several decades of investment.
However, the book misses a trick by not specifying who it is intended for, together with the points it intends to make, in the introductory portions. It would also have been good to include an organisational chart of the Department of Space, the space commission and ISRO’s various divisions, considering the narrative alludes to various branches of India’s space setup at different points.
There are a few other concerns with the book – especially in terms of what the author has left out – which limit the extent to which the arguments can be applied to the latest developments in the Indian and international space security sectors.
For example, Gopalaswamy doesn’t explore the role of the Advanced Data Processing Research Institute within ISRO: to work with the national defence and security communities. Similarly, the section detailing developments in space commerce in chronological order omits some major events, such as the US lifting its ban on American companies launching their payloads on Indian rockets.
When explaining the current landscape of civil-military integration in India, the author makes suggestions on how civilian and military space technology and space applications for security can be architected into the existing structure. However, he has also omitted a few important developments, like the Government of India’s creating the Defence Space Agency and the Defence Space Research Agency, to exploit space for warfare. Indeed, this new position renders much of the legacy debates by analysts on civil-military integration obsolete.
Final Frontier Bharath Gopalaswamy Westland, December 2019
Gopalaswamy also discusses the history of space-based communications and remote sensing as deployed by India and other countries. Japan would have been an interesting country to include here since it has taken big strides in the use of space-based assets and resources for national security. Gopalaswamy also leaves out a comparative analysis of the current operational assets in space of major space faring nations versus India, if only to help readers connect the dots better.
The book also discusses India’s satellite communications policy and suggests implementing a single-stage approval process for the private sector. However, a single window system is already available in the satcom policy landscape in India (Section 3.5). The book also doesn’t explicitly mention the need to separate the powers of the operator and the regulator in space activities; the government currently performs both roles in India, resulting in a virtual monopoly.
In the discussion of remote-sensing capabilities, there is a mistake in the projected cost of Ikonos satellite imagery: $25/sq. m has been printed instead of the correct $25/sq. km. Gopalaswamy’s historical accounts create a useful perspective to properly contextualise the purpose and goals of India’s remote-sensing and signals-intelligence missions. It would have been even better if it included an overview of India’s capabilities on these two fronts by comparing bands, resolutions, number of assets, areas of coverage, etc. based on operational satellites.
The chapters on position, navigation and timing (PNT) systems well outline the global navigation satellite systems currently operated by different countries. Gopalaswamy also makes a good case for creating a legislative and/or policy framework for India’s space-based PNT use.
As for the weaponisation of outer space, he describes the different types of space weapons, including directed-energy weapons, lasers, particle-beams, kinetic-energy weapons and nuclear weapons. A missing element here is the use of co-orbital space assets and rendezvous and proximity operations, or RPOs, together with an analysis of the most important recent actions by various actors. Two other useful additions in this context would have been cybersecurity and quantum communication. Nonetheless, Gopalaswamy understands what needs to be done for India to become a leader in creating an international space situational awareness network: as the number of satellites increases, especially in the low-Earth orbit, their population will quickly become a major challenge for both government and non-governmental operators.
The chapters that discuss the governance of outer space, international laws and the presently evolving landscape of India’s space-related legal framework together constitute the most insightful part of the book. Gopalaswamy does a good job of analysing the proposal for an International Code of Conduct for Outer Space and the Prevention of Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, and the responses of the world’s spacefaring nations to these ideas.
Similarly, he advances some fluent and straightforward arguments to legislate space activities based on India’s international obligations as well as the need to support the local space industry ecosystem. His analyses of the draft Space Activities Bill 2017 and the Geospatial Information Regulation Bill 2016 are must-reads to understand how these legal instruments will affect the Indian space programme, especially in terms of the challenges actors face outside the government.
Space security is an important and emerging area that India’s policymakers need to approach in interdisciplinary fashion. Overall, Gopalaswamy’s book in this regard provides a good foundation but is limited to historical examples – perhaps in an attempt to reel in the beginner. Future attempts to explore this subject should also review the current Indian capacity and policy positions vis-à-vis emerging technological capabilities, as well as deep-dives of various programmes, how they’re executed and – of course – the opportunities and challenges of the country’s nascent private space enterprises.
Narayan Prasad is the host of the NewSpace India podcast, India’s only talk show focused on space activities.
The complexity and cost of such a robotic mission is enormous. So far, only three countries have successfully pulled off anything similar.
The following article was originally published on July 14, 2019, and was republished on September 6.
Chandrayaan 2 is India’s first space mission of its kind. In this mission, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will attempt to soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon. If successful, India will go down in history as the fourth country to achieve a lunar landing, following the US, the USSR and China.
The launch had originally been slated for 2:51 am on July 15 but it was called off 56 minutes and 24 seconds before liftoff after engineers detected a “technical snag”, in ISRO’s words, in the GSLV Mk III’s launcher’s cryogenic upper stage. They spent the following week narrowing down on the exact problem: a pressure drop in a container of helium adjacent to a tank that held the supercold cryogenic fuel. Then, they performed an additional launch rehearsal to check if everything was okay, and successfully launched it at 2:43 pm on July 22.
Getting there
When Chandrayaan 2 was approved in 2007, the lander – the colloquial name of the module that will descend onto the lunar surface – was to be built by Russia while India was to be responsible for the orbiter and the rover. However, technical difficulties on the Russian side precipitated delays and eventually Russia backed out, unable to meet the revised mission deadline of 2015. At that point, India decided to undertake the lander engineering and launch as well, making the mission a fully indigenous endeavour.
In many ways, Chandrayaan 2 represents the pinnacle of ISRO’s space capabilities. Launching onboard India’s most powerful rocket, the GSLV Mk III, attempting their first ever lunar soft-landing and designing their first extraterrestrial rover, Chandrayaan 2 checks several ambitious firsts for India’s space organisation. In terms of mission complexity, Chandrayaan 2 goes beyond what was demanded of the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM).
Like with MOM, ISRO has doubled down on its outreach efforts and has been touting the Moon mission as the world’s first polar landing. In fact, ISRO finally created a YouTube channel and posted several official explainer videos, also their first, targeting younger viewers. ISRO has even invited people to witness the Chandrayaan 2 launch from their newly inaugurated ‘Launch View Gallery‘, with a seating capacity of 5,000.
Finally, it’s also notable that the mission is taking place parallel to a global frenzy to return to the Moon. China recently successfully landed its second spacecraft on the Moon, while NASA announced their Artemis Moon program to mark America’s return to the Moon from 2020.
Launch
Chandrayaan 2 consists of three spacecraft elements: the 1,471-kg lander named Vikram, the 27-kg rover named Pragyan and an improved version of the Chandrayaan 1 orbiter, weighing 2,379 kg. The rover will be housed inside the lander, and the lander will be mated to the orbiter during launch. The combined stack, called Chandrayaan 2, will be placed inside the GSLV Mk III’s nose cone.
Chandrayaan 2’s Vikram lander mated to the orbiter for launch. Photo: ISRO
ISRO’s GSLV Mk III rocket at the Second Launch Pad in Sriharikota. Image: ISRO
After lifting off at 2:43 pm on July 22, the rocket will place Chandrayaan 2 in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth. The total mass of the system – 3,877 kg – falls just within the limit of what India’s most powerful rocket can handle. Once in the elliptical orbit, the orbiter’s engines will fire and perform multiple orbit-raising manoeuvres until it takes the craft within the Moon’s gravitational influence. All this while, the orbiter will ensure its solar panels face the Sun to remain powered.
It’s interesting to compare this mission profile to one launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which costs about the same as the GSLV Mk III. The Falcon 9 can inject the same spacecraft directly into an orbit that goes all the way to the Moon, saving mission time and launch cost. This is something to think about instead of bragging about our cheap launch costs.
Chandrayaan 2’s mission profile following a July 14 launch. Image: ISRO
Approaching the Moon
Once Chandrayaan 2 is within the Moon’s gravitational influence, and getting closer, the orbiter will fire its engines in a direction opposite to its motion – like applying the brakes. This manoeuvre is necessary to ensure the craft allows the Moon to capture it. Chandrayaan 2 will now be in an elliptical orbit around the Moon. The closest point of the orbit is 100 km from the lunar surface and the farthest point will be several thousand kilometres away.
The craft will fire its engines several times again to lower its orbit until the orbit becomes circular (100 x 100 km). At this point, the lander, Vikram, will detach itself from the orbiter and enter a closer, elliptical orbit by performing a similar orbit-lowering burn. The advantage with a circular orbit is that it allows the orbiter to target the landing site in a more fuel-efficient way.
An artist’s impression of Chandrayaan 2 cruising above the Moon. The Vikram lander is still connected to the orbiter at this point in the mission. Image: ISRO
The orbiter’s high-resolution camera (OHRC) can photograph the Moon’s surface at a resolution of 0.32 m/pixel, which is better than the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (LRO) best resolution of 0.5 m/pixel. The OHRC will be used to identify safe touchdown spots in the landing region.
Once it has, the lander will commence descent to the surface from the lowest point in its orbit. The nature of the last orbit is such that the lander will touch down after local dawn at the landing site. This maximises the mission lifetime to an entire lunar day, from sunrise to sunset (14 Earth days), for surface operations. Both the lander and rover are solar-powered and are designed to operate for 14 Earth days only.
Landing site
Chandrayaan 2 landing site on the Moon. Image: Jatan Mehta
The Chandrayaan 2 landing site is in the Moon’s southern hemisphere, at 70.9° S, 22.8° E, in the highland (rocky) plain between the Manzinus C and Simpelius N craters. ISRO analysed imagery and topography data from the LRO and the Japanese Kaguya orbiter to select the site. Only the Apollo 16 and the Surveyor 7 missions have landed in highland regions thus far; all others have descended in the dark, smoother lava plains.
Aside: ISRO has been touting Chandrayaan 2 as a south pole landing mission. This is technically incorrect. Conditions unique to polar areas, including eternally dark regions and long periods of sunlight, are prominent from the 80° S/N latitude onward, not from around 70° S/N. So ISRO’s claim of Chandrayaan 2 being the first mission to land in a polar region is wrong. Having said that, Chandrayaan 2 is landing closer to the lunar pole than any mission thus far.
Autonomous lunar descent
The lunar descent is the most intriguing and challenging part of the mission. First, all five 800 N engines on the Vikram lander will fire in tandem to decelerate the craft. They will keep firing until the craft is just a few meters above the lunar surface and has segued into a slow, steady approach.
Once the lander is right above the pre-identified safe spot, the engines will be cut-off and the lander will fall freely under the Moon’s gravity. The lander’s structural frame has been designed to take the load of the impact, with the landing legs absorbing most of the shock. The primary reason to cut the engines off before touchdown is to keep its exhaust plumes from kicking up dust from the surface and creating a backflow of exhaust gases, which can degrade critical spacecraft parts like solar panels, sensors, etc. and contaminate scientific instruments.
An artist’s depiction of Vikram lander executing lunar touchdown. Image: ISRO
The entire descent stage is fully autonomous. During this stage, signals will take about three seconds to go from Earth to the lander and then come back. This is a significant delay in the scheme of things, so it won’t be practical for ISRO engineers on Earth to guide the landing. Instead, the lander has been equipped with sufficient intelligence to operate autonomously during the entire descent phase. This involves the onboard computer taking continuous input from sensors about its distance, velocity, acceleration, orientation, etc., computing its trajectory and autocorrecting it by orchestrating firing of the engines, until a safe touchdown.
If all goes to plan, Vikram will land on September 7.
Update (July 21, 2019):
Following a helium leak inside the Mk III rocket’s cryogenic upper stage, Chandrayaan 2’s launch was postponed from July 15 to July 22. As a result, due to the changing relative positions of Earth and the Moon, the Chandrayaan 2 stack will have to spend six more days orbiting Earth and two more days travelling to the Moon.
However, according to the mission page, the landing has only been pushed by a day, to September 7, 2019. This means engineers would have had to shave time off in a different part of the mission. This turns out to be the Moon-orbiting phase: the Chandrayaan 2 stack will spend about 15 fewer days in lunar orbit than originally planned.
There are other possibilities but they remain in the realm of speculation. The Moon-orbiting phase seems to have been finalised because it presents several opportunities to cut down the time spent here. Another option was for ISRO to delay the landing by 28 days, waiting for the Sun to rise again on the chosen landing site. But this involves using up a bit more propellant on the Moonward journey.
The complexity and cost of such a robotic mission is enormous; so far, only three countries have been successful: the American Surveyor landers (1966-1968), the Soviet Luna landers (1966-1976) and the Chinese Chang’e landers (2013 onwards). A recent landing attempt by an Israeli group failed.
The Mission
Once it has touched down, Vikram will recharge itself using the solar panels and establish a direct high-bandwidth communication link to Earth. It can also talk to the orbiter whenever the latter is in range. Once ISRO engineers have performed various health checks, the surface operations will begin.
The Pragyan rover will be deployed from the lander using a ramp. The rover will have no direct communication access to Earth or to the orbiter. It will communicate to the lander, which will relay the data to Earth. The commlink between the lander and the rover has a maximum range of 500 m, which means Pragyan can’t go farther than this from Vikram or it will lose contact.
An artist’s impression of Chandrayaan 2’s Vikram lander deploying the Pragyan rover on the lunar surface. Image: ISRO
The solar panels on both the Chandrayaan 2 lander and rover are mounted nearly 90° relative to the lunar surface. Since the landing site is at ~71° S, the Sun won’t rise higher than ~19° in the sky. As a result, the sideways-facing solar panels are directly pointed at the Sun, maximising power generation.
The orbiter, lander and rover, which together make up Chandrayaan 2, have their own sets of instruments. The orbiter carries eight while the lander and the rover carry four and two instruments respectively.
Surface science with Vikram
Vikram will insert a probe about 10 cm into the lunar soil to measure its thermal properties. A seismometer onboard will detect moonquakes, like NASA’s Apollo missions did. If a moonquake strong enough occurs during the mission, it could provide additional clues about what the Moon’s interior is like, particularly the core. Vikram will also carry a Langmuir probe to determine the amount, distribution and properties of hot, ionised particles on the lunar surface created by the solar wind, and a radio occultation experiment that will measure electron density in the Moon’s thin but persistent atmosphere.
NASA has contributed a laser retroreflector, much like they did to the Israeli mission that failed. Scientists will bounce laser pulses off the laser to understand the gravitational dynamics of the Earth-Moon system better.
Lunar geology with Pragyan
A model of the Chandrayaan 2 rover being tested at ISRO’s simulated lunar soil facility. Image: ISRO
The six-wheeled rover Pragyan will study the geology of the landing region. A small-sized Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, or APXS, will study what the rocks and lunar soil are made of. Both China’s Yutu rovers as well as all NASA’s Martian rovers have carried a similar instrument.
Pragyan also boasts of an ability that NASA’s Curiosity rover possesses: to shoot high-power laser pulses at a target material, vaporise it and analyse the emitted radiation to determine the material’s composition using a (different) spectrometer. The area where Vikram will land and which Pragyan will explore is geologically old, having formed at least 3.8 billion years ago. Both of Pragyan’s spectrometers are expected to find pristine materials from the ancient lunar crust, something no other mission has discovered before from this time period (3.8-3.9 billion years ago).
Mapping the Moon with the orbiter
An artist’s impression of the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter. Image: ISRO
Much like how LRO ‘saw’ Chang’e 4, it is expected that the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter will be able to capture images of Vikram and Pragyan from its orbit around the Moon. The orbiter will also continue to observe the Moon for one year, using – among other instruments – an advanced version of the mapping camera on Chandrayaan 1. Called the Terrain Mapping Camera 2, it will photograph large areas at a resolution of 5 m/pixel and generate 3D maps, comparable to LRO’s standard resolution. The aforementioned higher resolution camera will be used for specific areas of interest. Another instrument, called the Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer, will add mineral composition data to the maps.
One of the instruments that allowed Chandrayaan 1 to discover water ice on the lunar poles received an upgrade for Chandrayaan 2. The new Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) will map and quantify the amount of water ice at a higher resolution than the first and at better depths. SAR’s ability to penetrate deeper will also help scientists understand how the uppermost part of the lunar soil – called the regolith – is spread around the Moon. The orbiter will also use an infrared spectrometer to map the distribution of volatile substances, including those containing hydroxyl ions in and around the lunar poles, concentrated in permanently shadowed regions.
In all, the orbiter is going to be a versatile mapper, in many ways better than the LRO, which is now a decade old. Given that MOM will have been operating for five years this September, despite the nominal mission life being six months, ISRO believes the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter could survive for more than a year. However, let’s not forget that Chandrayaan 1 had a design life of two years but failed after only 10 months.
Is this enough?
The Chandrayaan 2 mission is a great technology demonstrator but is most limited by its lifetime. Having orbiters survive for longer is not as big a deal because they have easier access to sunlight compared to landed elements. However, it will be interesting to see if the LRO outlives the younger Chandrayaan 2 even after having been around for a decade.
That said, the true value of missions like Chandrayaan 2 banks more on the landed elements, which face more challenging conditions.
Both Vikram and Pragyan are designed to operate only for 14 Earth days. The problem isn’t that the lunar daytime is really hot but that the nights are too cold. Temperatures like -180º C aren’t unheard of. So once the lunar night kicks in, scientists expect both the lander and the rover will stop functioning and likely won’t awaken the next lunar morning. This in turn limits the mission’s scientific output.
It may not be fair to compare Chandrayaan 2 to NASA missions, past or present, but it would certainly be fair to compare them to their Chinese counterparts. China’s first lunar lander, Chang’e 3, touched down successfully in 2013 and is alive to this day. It uses radioactive heater units to survive the lunar night. More notably, the lander has been actively powering an ultraviolet telescope, one of the only two operational extraterrestrial telescopes in existence. The second such telescope also belongs to China, onboard Chang’e 4, the world’s first mission to land on the Moon’s far side. Its lander and rover both survive the lunar night fine and the mission is already six months in, continuing to relay troves of data.
Chang’e 4 lander on the far side of the Moon, as imaged by the Yutu 2 rover. Photo: CNSA
Yutu 2 rover on the far side of the Moon, as imaged by the Chang’e 4 lander. Photo: CNSA
Another worrisome aspect is that, save for NASA’s retroreflector, ISRO didn’t solicit international payloads for Chandrayaan 2. International payloads onboard Chandrayaan 1 were responsible for discovering water on the lunar poles. This is not to say that Indian science experiments aren’t capable but that global collaboration is likely to yield better results for everyone. The MOM didn’t solicit international payloads either. It’s not a good strategy to do everything on one’s own, including a space station. South Korea, for example, is currently soliciting payloads from the global science community for their first lunar orbiter in 2020.
The price-tag argument would simply be beating around the bush. Further, and again unlike its eminently comparable Chinese counterparts, ISRO’s forays into space seem to be composed of isolated missions not strung together by an overarching program. It’s not about if Chang’e 3 or 4 are superior but about the roadmap that drives the Chinese lunar programme, which is a programme. The roadmap’s next endeavour is a sample return mission this year, Chang’e 5, a significant jump in complexity over Chang’e 4.
On the other hand, what is it that we hope to do after landing on the Moon? How does the technology feed forward in an effective way to solve fundamental problems in space exploration? If we’re going to compete with China in our little space race, we might as well take cues from their roadmap and build one for ourselves.
Thanks to Adithya Kothandhapani for reviewing the article.
Jatan Mehta is a science writer and former science officer at TeamIndus Moon Mission. He has research experience in astrophysics and is passionate about space advocacy, science communication and open source. His portfolio is at jatan.space and he is on Twitter @uncertainquark.
Note: This article was updated on July 21 and 22 to include the reasons for the mission’s delay.
On one day in 1973, three American astronauts on board the Skylab space-station closed their radio link with NASA ground stations and took time off to relax.
The following article was first published on December 30, 2018. It is being republished today, July 19, 2019.
On December 28, 2018, the Government of India okayed India’s first human spaceflight programme at a cost of Rs 9,023 crore. The programme will attempt to launch three Indian astronauts to low-Earth orbit for as many as seven days. If the mission – slated to happen in 2022 – succeeds, India will become only the fourth country in the world able to launch astronauts into space.
It is not yet clear what the astronauts will do in space. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which is leading the programme, has said they will perform some science experiments on their first flight but nothing of what comes after. But there is no doubt that there are a lot of possibilities, and that astronauts – Indian and otherwise – have lots left to do in the coming decades. They are crucial in everything from extraterrestrial mining to Mars missions, from space diplomacy to weaponisation.
In this sense, it is important for space organisations to maintain a keen awareness of their spacefarers’ fitness. Humans are not naturally equipped to deal with the alien nature of space, to live in confined quarters with zero gravity, with no horizon in sight and limited resources. If they have trouble coping up there, things can get rapidly and profoundly disastrous for all involved.
NASA experienced one of the first such incidents (although there haven’t been many) 45 years ago. On one day in 1973, the three American astronauts on board the Skylab space-station closed their radio link with NASA ground stations and took time off to relax.
The Skylab was a space-station owned by the US and operated by NASA. Skylab 4 was the last mission on it. It began on November 16, 1973, with astronauts Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson and William Pogue. At the time of launch, the trio was told that their mission would last at least 60 days – a record at the time. It eventually lasted 84.
The two previous crews that had been on Skylab had completed a large amount of work – “150% of their science goals”, according to one telling. This gave NASA the impression that pushing the astronauts to do more was okay, even though the commanders of the two previous manned Skylab missions had advised against it. And because Carr, Gibson and Pogue would be the last astronauts onboard the experimental space station, NASA also wanted to make sure they would also finish all pending experiments.
The result was that the astronauts would have to work 16 hours a day for the entire duration of the mission. Their tasks, according to historian Erik Loomis, included “four spacewalks…, four days of observing the Comet Kohoutek as it passed near the Sun, conducting medical experiments, and 80 different projects to photograph specific places on Earth.”
Not surprisingly, as the days wore on, Carr, Gibson and Pogue – all of them on their first spacefaring mission – fell more and more behind schedule. At the same time, ground control kept pushing them to work harder.
On December 28, the astronauts snapped. Carr, the mission commander, relayed the following message to ground control:
We need more time to rest. We need a schedule that is not so packed. We don’t want to exercise after a meal. We need to get things under control.
Ground control didn’t relent. So Carr turned off the comms link and kicked back to the view with his fellow travellers.
Earthrise: astronauts aboard Apollo 8 captured this spectacular photo of Earth rising above the lunar horizon as they emerged from behind the dark side of the Moon. Credit: NASA
It was humanity’s first labour strike in space. And as such revolutions go, it was very successful, too. When Carr and co. came back online, NASA accepted most of their demands. There would be no more 16-hour shifts and all work would be stopped by 8 pm. The organisation also agreed to stop using minute-by-minute deadlines, switching instead to a daily task-list that let the crew figure its own schedule out, gave the crew full breaks for meals and stopped eavesdropping on them. As Loomis writes, things were smooth as a whistle after this episode.
The biggest takeaway for NASA was that, in space, it wasn’t in control; its astronauts were. It didn’t matter what its scientists had planned on Earth. When the astronauts were in orbit, they would get the final say on what and what not to do. But because space is such an expensive affair, this relationship couldn’t be left open-ended for mission controllers to deal with on an ad hoc basis.
The drive to achieve the highest possible performance from the crew was a hard-won lesson, Gibson recounted, but it was a lesson which would have untold ramifications in the planning of future long-term missions… (source)
They have since paid careful attention to the mental makeup of flight candidates, the crew module in which they will make their trip, and how ground control gets along with them. These issues come further to the fore as the mission duration lengthens, and astronauts become more susceptible to being disoriented by the extreme temperature, unusual passage of time and asthenia – the “dysphoric” sense of “oppression” arising from a highly “regimented” and tightly enforced routine (source).
The debut flight of the Indian human spaceflight programme is expected to last for a week. This may not be a long time relative to those undertaken on the International Space Station, but weighed by the scale of the infrastructure involved, it can still be a gruelling time.
The crew module to be used for the programme had the same external characteristics as the module ISRO tested in December 2014. That means the chamber housing the astronauts will be 2.7 m tall and 3.1 m wide. ISRO has announced two uncrewed and one crewed flights, and that the latter will carry three astronauts to space for no more than seven days.
Although we don’t know how the chamber will look on the inside, we do know it will be divided into two parts: one for the crew to live in and the other fit with equipment to help the crew live. The latter includes food and water supplies, waste management, and temperature control systems.
Given the extremely spartan lifestyle implied by these specs, it is no surprise that potential spacefaring candidates are typically selected from the air force, although ISRO has said it will cast a wider net. Members of the armed forces are in general more familiar with harsh environments. Other astronauts have noted that such exposure is useful to build the psychological fortitude required to withstand the rigours of living in space.
For India, an astronauts’ training facility is being set up near Bengaluru for future missions. For the first one, however, they will be trained by the Institute of Aviation Medicine, Bengaluru, together with Russian assistance. Since the first crewed flight is expected to happen sometime in 2022, it will be interesting to see how this training schedule evolves and the processes through which India’s second, third and fourth astronauts will be qualified to make history.
If ISRO is unable to launch the moon mission before July 31, the mission plan may need to be reworked.
New Delhi: After the last-minute launch cancellation, uncertainty prevails about when the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will be able to launch Chandrayaan-2, its prestigious moon mission.
While ISRO has officially said that the scheduled Chandrayaan-2 launch was cancelled due to a “technical snag”, the Times of India has reported that the issue was a leak in the cryogenic stage.
Chandrayaan-2, on board the GSLV-Mk III, was supposed to be launched at 2:51 am on July 15. However, less than an hour before lift-off, ISRO said that the launch was being cancelled.
“After filling liquid oxygen (oxidiser) and liquid hydrogen (fuel), helium was being filled. The procedure is to pressure the helium bottle up to 350 bars and regulate the output to 50 bars. After filling helium, we found the pressure was dropping, indicating there was a leak,” Times of India quotes a senior ISRO scientist as saying. “The team is yet to pinpoint the exact spot of the leak in the gas bottle; there could be multiple leaks.”
According to the newspaper, this leak did not come completely out of the blue – a similar oxygen leak in the cryogenic engine was detected on June 22, during a ground test. The team decided to go ahead anyway, Times of India reported, as the leak “didn’t mean that the flying engine would have the same problem, but there was always a probability. It was a calculated risk.”
According to the newspaper, the space agency is likely to announce its plan on Wednesday (July 17). Monday’s launch window was the longest (1o minutes). If ISRO decided to go ahead with the launch this month, it will have a one-minute window every day. The window will then close at the end of July, Times of India reported, and then ISRO will have to wait till at least September for the launch. The newspaper quoted some scientists as saying that the launch may not happen this year.
If the July 31 window is missed, an ISRO source was quoted as saying, the mission plan may need to be reworked as more fuel will be needed. “This will affect operations of payloads. If we miss the deadline, the orbiter’s life may be reduced to six months from the present one year, as it would have used up some of its fuel.”
ISRO seems to want to try and make the July 31 deadline. This is reinforced by the fact that the space agency has a fresh note-to-airmen (NOTAM, an alert issued before the launch). However, the NOTAM does not specify when the launch will take place. The alert is effective on July 17 between 2:30 am and 3:30 am, and for July 18 to 31 between 2 pm and 3:30 pm. “Actual date of launch will be intimated 24 hr in advance through a separate NOTAM,” the note says.
The next launch attempt is likely to be made in August.
Less than an hour before lift off, India’s second mission to the moon, Chandrayaan-2 onboard GSLV Mk III-M1, was called off on Monday due to a technical snag, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said.
The launch call-off is likely to precipitate further delays for Chandrayaan 2, which has been pending since at least 2017, because the current launch window expires on July 16.
The launch call-off is likely to precipitate further delays for Chandrayaan 2, which has been pending since at least 2017, because the current launch window expires on July 16.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) postponed the launch of its GSLV Mk III rocket, carrying the Chandrayaan 2 modules, only 56 minutes before liftoff in the early hours of July 15. The order to scrub the launch was issued in an exercise of “abundant caution”, according to ISRO officials, after they detected what they only described as a “technical snag” during the customary pre-flight checks.
Update (8:19 pm, July 15, 2019): According to Chethan Kumar of the Times of India, “a leak in the cryo stage led to the abortion of Chandrayaan 2”.
Chandrayaan 2 is a modular stack comprising three units: an orbiter, a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan. If the Mk III had lifted off successfully and injected the stack into an elliptical orbit around Earth, the trio would have reached the Moon by September. There, on September 6/7, Vikram would have attempted to perform a soft-landing over the lunar surface and roll Pragyan out. The trio collectively carried a suite of 14 instruments to perform detailed studies of the Moon’s surface, subsurface and atmospheric characteristics.
This event is likely to precipitate further delays for the mission, which has been pending since at least 2017, because the current launch window expires on July 16. Four of those delays have been since only March 2018.
“The technical snag was noticed [when] the cryogenic fuel was being loaded. We have to approach the vehicle to assess the problem,” one unnamed ISRO official told IANS. “First we have to empty the fuel loaded in the rocket, then the rocket will be taken back for further investigation.” Engineers would never hurry this procedure, evidenced by the fact that spokesperson B.R. Guruprasad has confirmed the organisation is giving itself 10 days to resolve the issue.
Effectively, this means ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 mission to the Moon won’t be happening until later this month, or may even be pushed to August. However, it is notable that two GSLV launches – both of the Mk II variant – have already been scheduled for later this year, carrying the GISAT 1 and 2 satellites. Another Mk II launch is expected to lift the GSAT-32 instrument in February next year. Together with the multiple PSLV missions, any additional delay will mean ISRO will have a hectic launch schedule.
This is only yet another delay in India’s prestigious Moon mission, but unlike the previous occasions, almost all of which were due to technical issues and procedural lapses, the current one is eminently more understandable. Irrespective of how successful ISRO has been with its PSLV rockets, rocket launches have been and will always be extremely complex affairs, each with thousands of opportunities of failure. In the event a fault has been detected, it is always prudent to scrub the launch, examine the problem, resolve it, ensure it is resolved and attempt to launch again.
If this wasn’t stressful enough, the Mk III rocket carrying Chandrayaan 2 was set to lift off in front of a live audience of over 5,000 – a first thanks to ISRO’s new viewing gallery – one of whom was Ram Nath Kovind, the President of India.
In typical fashion, ISRO has not been forthcoming about the actual nature of the problem; however, sources within the organisation said they they what the problem actually was (as the Times of India was subsequently able to verify). An official tweet confirming the scrub had shortly been preceded by an announcement that engineers had finished loading the propellant onto the rocket. The proximity of the two events suggested the snag had something to do with the fuel systems. News24 had previously reported that the problem has to do with a component called a fuel conductor.
The mission to launch Chandrayaan 2, designated M1, is the Mk III rocket’s first operational flight. It has flown one suborbital and two orbital test flights before this, between December 2014 and November 2018. While all of them were successful, only the latter two carried a cryogenic upper stage (CUS). Since the first flight of the GSLV Mk I in April 2001, ISRO has flown 15 missions carrying the CUS, of which two were partial failures and three were complete failures. However, all but one of them occurred with the Mk I rocket, and the one with the first flight of the Mk II, and the latter was due to a turbo-pump malfunction in the CUS.
So considering the GSLVs don’t yet have a long history of successful launches, and especially not the Mk III variant, confidence in the success of a GSLV launch is still nowhere near as high as with the PSLVs. For the Mk III to get there, it has to first successfully complete one operational mission; that mission is the M1, and it is currently on hold.
Much of this tentativeness has to do with the complexity of the cryogenic engine inside the CUS. Cryogenic engines were conceived by NASA in the early days of the Cold War space race to make use of hydrogen as a fuel. Hydrogen has the highest exhaust velocity of all known fuels: 4.55 km/s (with oxygen as oxidiser); to compare, the unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine used by the Vikas engine onboard a PSLV has an exhaust velocity of 3.42 km/s (with nitrogen tetroxide as oxidiser).
However, hydrogen is a gas and is harder to pump, so engineers first liquefy it and store it at extremely low, or cryogenic, temperatures. And to use it as such, engineers also designed and built special turbo-pumps, valves, engines and other materials, as well as cryogenic systems to allow them to load and unload the fuel from the rocket as necessary. The loading/unloading procedures are tricky because hydrogen reacts violently with oxygen, so even a small leak can wreck the rocket and launchpad.
Then again, the story of Chandrayaan 1, which launched in late-2008, serves as a cautionary tale that the CUS and liquefied hydrogen are not the only headaches ISRO engineers have to deal with. Chandrayaan 1 was launched onboard a PSLV rocket. However, shortly before launch, officials noticed that nitrogen tetroxide had leaked from a fault in the piping and engulfed the rocket in a poisonous smoke. Engineers then scrambled to work through the smoke and fix the fault in time for the launch.
The last GSLV failure was the Mk II mishap, on April 2010, when the rocket failed to reach the geostationary transfer orbit to inject the GSAT-4 satellite. According to the official failure report, “The thrust build up did not progress as expected due to non-availability of liquid hydrogen supply to the thrust chamber of the main engine,” which in turn was the result of the fuel-booster turbo-pump unexpectedly shutting down 1.5 seconds after it came on.
The space agency said it will announce a revised launch date soon.
Sriharikota: Less than an hour before lift off, India’s second mission to the moon, Chandrayaan-2 onboard GSLVMkIII-M1, was called off on Monday due to a technical snag, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said.
The countdown to the launch scheduled for 2:51 am was stopped 56 minutes and 24 seconds before lift off, at 1:55 am, following the announcement from the Mission Control Centre.
Confusion prevailed for several minutes before ISRO came out with an official confirmation about the launch being cancelled.
“A technical snag was observed in the launch vehicle system at t-minus 56 minutes. As a measure of abundant precaution Chandrayaan 2 launch has been called off for today,” ISRO associate director (public relations), B.R. Guruprasad said.
“Revised launch date will be announced later,” he added.
Another ISRO official said: “Launch is called off due to technical snag. It is not possible to make the launch within the (launch) window. (A new) launch schedule will be announced later.”
The space agency had earlier scheduled the launch in the first week of January but shifted it to July 15.
The lift-off of the three-component spacecraft weighing 3,850 kg and comprising an orbiter, the lander and the rover was scheduled from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) here.
President Ram Nath Kovind was in Sriharikota to witness the launch.
The Chandrayaan-2 was supposed to explore the uncharted lunar south pole, 11 years after ISRO’s successful first lunar mission – Chandrayaan-1, which made more than 3,400 orbits around the moon and was operational for 312 days till August 29, 2009.
The Rs 978 crore Chandrayaan-2 onboard the heavy-lift rocket Geosynchronous Launch Vehicle GSLV-MkIII-M1, nicknamed Baahubali, would have taken 54 days to accomplish the task of landing on the Moon through meticulously planned orbital phases.
After a full dress rehearsal last week, the countdown for the mission commenced at 6:51 am on Sunday and scientists had undergone various stages of propellant filling to power the rocket ahead of the launch.
Billed as the most complex and prestigious mission ever undertaken by the ISRO since its inception, Chandrayaan-2 would make India the fourth country to soft land a rover on the lunar surface after Russia, the United States and China.
If successful, the mission will place the first Indian rover on the moon’s surface.
The Indian Space Research Organisation is launching its Chandrayaan 2 mission on board a GSLV Mk III rocket from its spaceport in Sriharikota. If the mission is successful, it will have placed the first Indian rover on the Moon’s surface. This is India’s most complex robotic mission till date.
One poster shows the show’s protagonists flanking a Russian Soyuz launcher. Another shows their faces lined up over an ascending NASA Space Shuttle. However, ISRO had launched its Mars satellite on a PSLV XL.
Bengaluru: Have you seen the GSLV Mk II? It’s one good looking rocket. It’s almost 50 m tall, has a sleek body, four L40 boosters on the first-stage and a cryogenic upper stage. Though the GSLV Mk I looks similar, its cryogenic upper stage was powered by a Russian engine. The Mk II is more ‘Made in India’ that way, which seems to matter to so many people these days, with an India-made cryogenic engine at the top.
This is just one reason the new posters for the TV show called M.O.M. – The Women Behind Mission Mangal, produced by Ekta Kapoor and distributed by AltBalaji, look strange. Released on June 7, one poster shows four women, presumably the show’s protagonists, flanking a large rocket in the centre that appears to be a Russian Soyuz launcher. Another shows their faces lined up over an ascending NASA Space Shuttle. However, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had launched the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) in November 2013 with a PSLV rocket in its XL configuration.
Kapoor wrote on her Instagram post, “This show is on the women who sent the mission [to] Mars – partly fictional keeping in mind the sacrosanct nature of ISRO. This is by far one of the most inspirational stories I have ever heard after millions of meetings with ISRO and a certain amount of sacrosanct secrecy that they would like us to maintain.” It would be reasonable to assume then that, after “millions of meetings”, Kapoor and her production team knew what the rockets actually looked like.
Update: At around 4:30 pm on June 12, AltBalaji issued a statement to The Wire saying that the show is a fictional adaptation and that, as a result, it is “legally bound not to use actual names or images of the people, objects or agencies involved”. The note added that “publicity material” of the show was designed with their “contractual obligations in mind”.
When asked why the show then used the official acronym – MOM – a spokesperson stated that it stood for “Mission Over Mars”, not ‘Mars Orbiter Mission’ as was supposed.
The GODL license
‘Sacrosanct’ is a troubling word because it should have no place where public outreach is important. In most other circumstances, and in keeping with its storied attitude towards public outreach, ISRO is simply not interested in publicising its achievements. This is why MOM was significant in more ways than one: its launch marked the sole occasion when ISRO insiders engaged in any significant public engagement – online and off; one group of space scientists even organised a Q&A session on Reddit.
Additionally, MOM was a technology demonstration mission; its primary objective was, and remains, to get into orbit around Mars, which it did in September 2014. So it is curious what its maker would like to be secretive about, especially as a civilian space organisation, when its more accessible peers NASA and the European Space Agency can tell you exactly what technologies would have to be used to get into orbit around Mars.
However, beyond the claims in Kapoor’s own post, there is a larger issue centred on confusion over reuse rights on images published by ISRO. For example, American federal law denies copyright to all images obtained by NASA’s instruments (a stipulation that leads to some tension in the 2015 film The Martian). On the other hand, India does not have a similarly free-ranging, and mandated, formal works-of-government exception to copyright.
Some images that ISRO has uploaded into the Wikimedia Commons library sport a Government Open Data License (GODL), published in 2017, with the following explanatory note:
Following the mandate of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) of Government of India that applies to all shareable non-sensitive data available either in digital or analog forms but generated using public funds by various agencies of the Government of India, all users are provided a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, adapt, publish (either in original, or in adapted and/or derivative forms), translate, display, add value, and create derivative works (including products and services), for all lawful commercial and non-commercial purposes, and for the duration of existence of such rights over the data or information.
The NDSAP was advanced in 2012, so there are no ISRO images in the library from before that year. Additionally, Shashank Govindaraju, a senior associate at Factum Law, Bengaluru, said that the terms of this license elevate the images into the public domain. However, he acknowledged a difference from a jurisprudential point of view. “Imagine you own a house and you let your friend stay there. You still own the house but you are letting your friend have a free ride.” Similarly, “By retaining copyright, it enables [the government] to modify the terms of the license.”
If the images had been in the public domain, on the other hand, AltBalaji or any other producer for that matter could still have banked on the popularity of ISRO’s launch vehicles – and added to it in turn – without having to borrow from Russian and American albums.
Third, the GODL requires a clunky attribution format that might have been more at home in the academic literature:
[Name of Data Provider], [Year of Publication], [Name of Data], [Name of Data Repository/Website], [Version Number and/or Date of Publication (dd/mm)], [DOI / URL / URI]. Published under [Name of License]: [URL of License].
Finally, the number of images that are available with the GODL license and the NDSAP’s protection, at least on the Wikimedia Commons, is low. This is understandable since the act of uploading official images to the library seems to be discretionary; there appears to be no policy that mandates ISRO to ensure all its images are made available in this manner. A similar qualification is not visible on the ISRO website either, but its ‘terms of use’ clearly states:
The copyright of the material of ISRO contained in this website belongs to and remains solely with ISRO. If any user is interested to use the material of ISRO featured in this Website, then, the user is required to take the permission from ISRO.
One consequence of these factors has been that ISRO imagery just hasn’t been all over the internet the way visuals from NASA missions have been. For example, NASA images, GIFs and videos in the Wikimedia Commons and Flickr Commons libraries are either completely in the public domain, free of all copyright, or have a Creative Commons Attributions license (a.k.a. CC BY). In fact, many images of Indian missions, including two of the INSAT 1B (here and here), have been attributed to NASA and are completely in the public domain.
A suitable rocket
As it happens, media materials produced by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, seem to be limited by restricted access, with multiple caveats about how such materials may be used. The Japanese Space Agency also provides restricted access, while the European Space Agency is more relaxed, though not entirely.
It is not obvious what the issue with placing all ISRO images, even if not all data, explicitly in the public domain would be. The counterargument that it would exacerbate misinformation, and fake news, is irredeemably flawed, as the NDSAP’s text itself confirms. Without access to these resources, and more importantly the clarity on their use/reuse, ISRO merchandise is virtually non-existent.
Setting aside the need to be ‘sacrosanct’ about anything, Leslee Lazar, a neuroscientist and visual artist, said, “The MOM show might not be angling for accuracy, but they should have been careful as rockets are the central theme, apart from the women. They could have easily got an illustrator to represent the correct ISRO rockets.”
Minnie Vaid Those Magnificent Women and Their Flying Machines Speaking Tiger, 2019
In fact, the cover of Those Magnificent Women and Their Flying Machines, a 2019 book about ISRO’s women scientists by the author and journalist Minnie Vaid, shows a non-ISRO rocket on its cover. It looks like the Soyuz but it is painted like the PSLV, in alternating bands of white and deep red. A diminutive credit-line at the back of the book says the photos of Mars on the front and back covers are from ISRO and the “satellite” was the work of illustrator R.C. Prakash.
Given that a photograph of the PSLV C25’s launch is available on Wikimedia Commons under the GODL license, it is not clear why Speaking Tiger chose to commission their own image of a launcher. Renuka Chatterjee, its vice-president of publishing, told The Wire on June 14, “The cover of Minnie Vaid’s book is [illustrative], and so we didn’t do an exact representation of the actual rocket. Yes, it was for design purposes only.”
So on the one hand, we have an organisation that, actively or passively, has been pinching the supply of processed and unprocessed data into the public domain. On the other, we appear to have a demand for stories revolving around this data but which is accompanied by a strange (thus far, at least) reluctance to want to use that data when the opportunity presents itself. Perhaps even more importantly, neither group seems to mind – at least not publicly – so are we to believe there is even a problem here?
Note: This article was updated on June 12, 2019, at 4:38 pm to include AltBalaji’s clarification and modified to remove Prateep Basu’s quote, and on June 14, 2019, to include Speaking Tiger’s response.
