On 14th July 2023, the news television channels in India had a busy broadcast day juggling between three significant events: the launch of Chandrayaan-3, the foreign sponsored-unrest in Manipur, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Paris as the chief guest of the French National Day celebrations. For many, including the news channels, these three events were disconnected. But then that is where the problem lies. Most ‘we-the-people’ never see science, diplomacy and national security in the same context.
Like all of us, I am confident that Chandrayaan-3 will be a great technical success. Of course, our space agency will be more than satisfied with the soft landing on the Moon. But then, there are higher goals to achieve through our lunar pursuits — some pursuits may appear outlandish to ‘we-the-people’ who are busy troubleshooting our socio-economic issues and think lunar missions are a luxury of science. Those who deem lunar aspirations a luxury, do a great disservice to India’s geopolitical urgencies. Instead, they suffer from Arjuna Syndrome as many are naive and earnest believers in global commons. Like Arjuna, who saw a family in the warring Kauravas, most who matter to India’s space programme are innocent internationalists. They rarely comprehend that countries resolute about their national interests have flourished well while those nations following innocent internationalism have found themselves in a ditch. Perhaps they know it but do not wish to offend those with a clear upper edge and intent to dominate in outer space.
Our scientific community was small in the pre-independence era; and thank the lords over us, they were not innocent internationalists but pragmatic nationalists. Science India, in its previous issues, has discussed the geopolitical and geo-economic foresight of many stakeholders of Indian science before independence. We seldom acknowledge them — our perception of the progenitors of the space programme rarely goes beyond Vikram Sarabhai, great in his own right, and our minds never ask about the roles played by numerous other characters who spent their lives for a better day of Indian science. Our narrative for outer space rarely goes beyond the technical achievements and making the population feel proud of being the second or fifth country to do something or be part of a club. ‘We-the-people’ still believe in joining existing clubs, not forming one where others join.
India-Moon-France
No news channel, no space sector veteran, and no political leader were able to connect the two events that happened on 14th July. No Indian Prime Minister ever participated as a chief guest on the national day of any Western power. In the past 76 years of independence, there were hardly three days when we launched a spacecraft to the Moon. The PM being in Paris on the day Chandrayaan was launched should have been a reason to celebrate the India-Moon-France connection and acknowledge the massive unsung role of CV Raman and his protege Shishir Kumar Mitra in India’s space programme.
Precisely 100 years ago, in 1923, Shishir Kumar Mitra, a prodigious physics graduate student of the Nobel Prize winner CV Raman, earned his second PhD from the University of Paris under the mentorship of the renowned French scientist Charles Fabry. That was an era when only a handful of Indian students managed to pursue PhDs in universities outside Vilayat — Britain. Here it gets more interesting — Charles Fabry and SK Mitra have some connection with the Indian space programme, which finally began taking shape after 1957. So, after pursuing his postdoctoral research with another Nobel Prize winner, Marie Curie, SK Mitra returned to India and played a massive role in strengthening India’s participation in the 1957 International Geophysical Year. The IGY-1957 had set the ball rolling for establishing space activities in India.
Coming to Fabry’s connection. Do you recollect, one of the scientific objectives of the Mars Orbiter Mission, or Mangalyaan, was to detect gaseous methane in the Martian atmosphere? This detection was to happen by a scientific payload called Methane Sensor for Mars, a radiometer based on Fabry-Perot optical sensors invented by Charles Fabry and his colleague Jean-Baptiste Alfred Perot. Do you know what the Moon connection here is? All these three gents have a lunar crater named after them. The two Fabry and Mitra craters are present on the far side of the Moon, whereas the Raman crater is located on the western side of the Oceanus Procellarum. No, the craters were not named by India or ISRO. The International Astronomical Union named them. Overall, Mitra’s second PhD matters a lot to India’s scientific history and the Chandrayaan programme as it entrenched Indian scientists globally during the 1920s, the Golden Age of Physics, and the benefits that world science enjoys even today. What is emerging today — artificial intelligence and quantum science — got theorised during those momentous golden years. But sadly, we do not go too far in history to acknowledge the role of our scientific pitr. ‘We-the-people’ are accustomed to revering convenient heroes and are too lazy to find many who are not told or written about.
Why is Chandranyaan a hare among hounds?
India’s space exploration missions are enjoying tremendous media response worldwide. Ironically, this happens simultaneously when social media and conventional media are at loggerheads, and hype has become a currency of success. Therefore, there is a diminishing scope to rationale the next steps and strategic goals to be achieved from such missions. Governments across the world, to endure their seat of power, are fighting hyped criticism and countering it with hyped appreciation. However, little is being done to capitalise on such missions’ soft power and eventually acquire hard power capabilities. And there is a legitimate exigency on why we should be doing it. A vast majority of India’s scientific community is focused and simple-minded. They wish no ill for any culture or nation. If given ample resources, which eventually the growing Indian economy would afford, Indian scientists could achieve tremendous heights of scientific exploration of the Moon and other planets. But, the world’s endeavour for the Moon is not as simple anymore. The exploitation of the Moon is beginning to take precedence over scientific exploration. Chandrayaan, in such a situation, is a hare among hounds!
The Moon for the established space-faring nations, primarily the US, China and their respective partners, is becoming the next colonial target, an extraterrestrial location to exert hegemony and dominance. We already know that the Anglophone nations — UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand — led by the US, which together form a group called Five Eyes, have gathered many countries to sign a non-binding document called the Artemis Accords. India and France have signed it, and both have substantial national space capabilities built independently of the US. If things are to be placed in context, India’s Chandrayaan-3 is the first lunar-bound mission to fly after New Delhi signed the Artemis Accords. Perhaps, New Delhi today comprehends that its interests are better suited by partnering with the signatories of the Artemis Accords than the China-led group building the International Lunar Research Station.
Those questioning India’s signing of this US-led agreement must understand that India’s Chandrayaan and Mangalyaan missions have heavily depended on American technology support, particularly the ground communication support from the US’s global Deep Space Network (DSN) based out of Spain, California, and Australia. The simplistic rationale often given is that such sharing of DSN fosters international collaborations. But had that been the case, why did Europe, Russia and China raise their own deep space networks? Of these, the Chinese space exploration programme began with India, and its Chang’e-1 mission and Chandrayaan-1 were launched around the same time, in 2007-08. Today China has its own DSN— in China, Namibia and Argentina — and today is no longer dependent on the US’s largesse; India is.
Dove v/s Wolf in Outer Space
‘We-the-people’ have been too meek in using space to further India’s strategic interests, and most of us gullibly believe in ‘space as global commons.’ If that was the case, did we ever do a comprehensive review of other space-faring nations and whether they operate a Janus-faced space programme? In a recently published book titled “The Net Space Race: A Blueprint for American Primacy”, authors Richard Harrison and Peter Garretson of the American Foreign Policy Council acknowledge that the US’s civilian space agency NASA, along with the Pentagon’s Space Force and other agencies must ensure US’s dominance in space as China rises. Why do ‘we-the-people’ hold on to the dovish concept of global commons when the US, China, and Russia clearly enter outer space for dominance?
Public memory has shortened tremendously, and in this day and age of social media, we only remember the best and worst of episodic memories. Most of us have forgotten that India’s scientific and peaceful missions do get attacked. The unconfirmed 2019 cyberattack by the North Korean group Lazarus during the Chandrayaan-2 launch is a testimony that the Indian space programme, despite its international friendliness, strong beliefs in global commons, and pacifist stances, still gets attacked. Why does a peaceful institution get cyber-attacked?
As is always said, history repeats itself.
Indian space planners must become extremely serious about the nation’s lunar plans. The global agenda for the Moon is rapidly becoming economic in nature. Stakes are running high about who controls the cislunar (Earth-Moon) communications and logistics network. While we feel content about landing on the moon, hardly anyone tells us about the US Air Force’s Cislunar Highway Patrol System. The patrol system is meant to identify enemy spacecraft approaching the Moon under the pretext of space domain awareness. Another grave emerging risk is the cyber-attack on satellite constellations and space stations. The American cybersecurity establishment has recorded over 6000 cyber attacks on NASA assets on the ground and in space. All countries with space capabilities, however friendly with others, are susceptible to cyber-attacks. Earlier in 2022-23, the US and its allies decided to voluntarily put a moratorium on using direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons and, while doing so, have taken a moral high ground in the name of sustainable operations in outer space. However, suppose kinetic anti-satellite weapons are not to be used anymore. In that case, we Indians, rarely ponder why cislunar patrolling systems are being raised, why so many cyber-attacks on spacecraft, satellites, and ground stations are happening, and why adversaries are targeting civilian space agencies. We rarely ponder over the gravitas of the more terrorising version of the new space race that now extends into the cislunar realms.
It will be futile and dangerous to assume the emerging space race to be anything like the world saw between the US and USSR. That yesteryear space race was more demonstrative; the new one has financial dimensions. Resources are to be extracted from the Moon, services offered from the lunar surface, lunar orbit and cislunar highways, and more so, enormous revenues are to be generated and controlled by a select few countries and their entities. Continuing to be simple-minded with designing Chandrayaan-like missions will land us nowhere, even if we land on the Moon.
Waking up to Power Contest in Space
New Delhi will need to step up its lunar plans on a massive scale. It will have to push for galvanising the lunar programme in a way that ISRO has never done. There is a great power contest brewing, and New Delhi will have to think outside the box to use its space companies and startups. The government is correct in its recent attempt to make ISRO focus only on R&D. New Delhi will have to brainstorm intensely and stop merely using ISRO and the companies for their occasional glory. And who has said that Artemis Accords is simply an understanding between the US and its signatories? It also indicates that the signatories can collaborate among themselves. India must flood the lunar market with components, technologies and services with a hallmark of ‘Made in India’ and ‘Made only by India’. Not doing so, the Chandrayaan series will only give us a momentary dopamine high and, in the long run, will make us lose our metastrategic sense.
Furthermore, ‘we-the-people’ must remember that cyber-attacks, industrial espionage, sabotage, and violent merger and acquisitions are fast becoming a reality. With heightened competition between not one and two but many space-faring countries — corporate warfare between space sector companies — including those operating on the Moon — is not far away.
One feels sorry that ‘we-the-people’ are rosy about outer space, and there is hardly any analysis of threats from space in the media — the fourth pillar of democracy. The great man CV Raman, whose name is on the Moon, said something extremely important to a gathering of graduate students in 1969, which stands true even to this day. He said,
“We have, I think, developed an inferiority complex. I think what is needed in India today is the destruction of that defeatist spirit. We need a spirit of victory, a spirit that will carry us to our rightful place under the sun, a spirit which can recognise that we, as inheritors of a proud civilization, are entitled to our rightful place on this planet. If that indomitable spirit were to arise, nothing could hold us from achieving our rightful destiny.”
If we put these great words in today’s context, it is about time ‘we-the-people’ stopped living in a pacifist trance regarding outer space. There is a lot to learn from the generation of SK Mitra and CV Raman; they excelled in bridging science with diplomacy and the security of their goals of independence when the imperial regime was against their doing and excelling in science. Today, we have a polity that supports science and has strategic plans to set and achieve. It is time to end the strategic naivety regarding the Moon; Moon is the fountainhead of our national security. ‘We-the-people’ better realise this evolving reality or prepare to face a new form of imperialistic colonialism once again.
*The author is the editor of Interstellar News; an Associate Professor at FLAME University, Pune; a Space Policy & Diplomacy Consultant at the Ministry of External Affairs’ autonomous think tank, Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), New Delhi and Advisor to the Satcom Industry Association-India. He has an award-winning PhD in Astrochemistry and spent his doctoral and postdoctoral years in Germany, France, Japan and the United States. He was a crew member of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Mission.
