How the secret behind ISRO's success lies in India's civilisational continuity

In 1983, the year India was jubilant due to its first ever cricket world cup victory under ‘Dream 11’, led by skipper Kapil Dev, American novelist Tom Wolfe wrote ‘The Right Stuff’ on Apollo 11, the astronauts who were part of the world’s first manned moon flight in 1969. The book’s title has since become the hallowed byword for American grit, dexterity, passion, innovation, unsurpassable energy, vibrancy, and the quest to do the unthinkable. Written by a non-expert, non-scientist, it has become the canonical text on the high glories of American space, which settled the score on space race, heralding a new era of collaboration between the two rival superpowers. During the promotional tours, Wolfe, the maverick populariser and par excellence practitioner of ‘Neo Journalism’, often said that he doesn’t understand space at all. In the giddy counter-cultural 1960s, he made his name with the playfully titled ‘Kandy Colored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby’, a zany reportage of a custom car show in New York. Heart of the matter What motivated Wolfe to write about the Apollo space programme was not the concepts of heat propulsion, laws of thermodynamics, or marvels of engineering design, but innate curiosity about what it takes for a person to get inside a capsule that will be thrown into outer space with a tremendous thrust and velocity. He wanted to know what it takes for men to enrol for such an ordeal where success is elusive, risk looms high, error margin is wafer-thin, and the sliver of opportunity is always slipping. The answer lies in working collectively towards a goal that can transcend many mundane concerns, while being patiently absorbed in the pursuit of incremental targets. Though the Apollo 11 has been mythologised as the modern day apostles of technological prowess, there are numerous more unsung everyday heroes – and heroines – who collectively played a role in that triumph, defying all historical determinism and rebuking ‘men as puny cogs-in-the-wheel’ pessimistic school of thought. There’s a lesson to be grasped: behind all those propellers, cryogenic engines, sensors, controllers, rovers, are visionaries, mavericks, pioneers, and trailblazers. Why they persevered or stood their ground, what impelled them, what animated their belief, what piqued their interest, is something that not only deserves awestruck admiration but merits chronicing for posterity. This is where niche technology intersects with quotidian humanity, and where the ‘Two Cultures’ harmonically compliment each other. In his essay compilation, ‘The Last Liberal and other Essays’, Ramchandra Guha rues that the biographical tradition in India is not strong unlike in the west due to a mix of philosophical reticence, fatalism, and sense of impending doom and everything being absorbed into cosmic nothingness. Many other historians have passed similar verdicts about India’s historiographical amnesia, if not biographical denial. ‘There’s a story in every person’ goes a phrase, and if those stories that matter remain unheard or unexamined, the intangible civilisational loss is colossal. Civilisational continuity The world’s largest country, gearing towards science & technology and space applications to solve some of the most pressing problems from climate change, food security, to urban planning, should keep indelible accounts of its space ecosystem and its pioneers. Chandrayaan-3 – made at a shoestring budget –said to be lower than that of Hollywood movies Interstellar and even the recent Barbenheimers – makes India the first country to land on the moon’s South Pole and world’s fourth after the former USSR, USA, and China. Though successive governments have talked about ‘instilling scientific temperament’ and technology dissemination at the grassroots, these cannot be seen as strait-laced abstractions, or part of a routine scheme task list. It has to blossom organically over time by strengthening the ’ties that bind’, and making the narrative of science and innovation a part of the national conscience and ethos. This cannot be done without embossing in ink the lives and times of scientists, engineers, space administrators, and others who are the visible and invisible dramatis personae in this splendid saga. Indian space programme, just like the nation, is a palimpsest, with the bootstrapped startups, working from 3D printed rockets to imagery analytics and launch services, adding new layers on top of what was initiated by visionaries such as Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan. What began in a coastal fishing village in Kerala, with sounding rockets carried atop a bicycle, has now reached another landmark that few would have imagined, let alone trusted. After the world record of placing 104 satellites in orbit in a single launch, to becoming the first country to perform soft landing on Moon’s South Pole, this is India’s tryst with spacefaring destiny. ISROs cost-optimisation is peerless in the world. Consider the fact that the cost of a single space launch from SpaceX Falcon 9 is $67 million, while the entire Chandrayaan-3 mission, over multiple years, cost $75 million. New accomplishments in space have been built on the groundwork laid by a generation of scientists before, and the beacon of inspiration that they provide to new entrants. British conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton defined society as a “trans-trusteeship between the unborn and the dead”. Another leading German thinker of the 19th century, against whose votaries and epigones Scruton led a protracted crusade, wrote what he would have agreed with – about men scripting their own history, but not under ‘self-selected’ circumstances and conditions, rather under constraints of what was ’transmitted from the past’. The ‘unbroken thread’ between past, present and future, between legacy and bequest, between the individual and community, between years of toil and sudden breakthroughs, and between accrued knowledge and fluttering eureka moments, is applicable to sociology as well as science, and is key to imbuing a knack for technology and innovation in generations to come. While sustainability, ESG and carbon footprints are all in vogue today, the true unalloyed spirit of sustainability simply boils down to conserving, preserving, and transmitting to the future generations – not just land, forests, lakes or resources, but knowledge systems, idea of history, cultural memory, and sense of a place in the world. Tale of two neighbours In an alternative 21st century retelling of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘The Life of Galileo’, the unluckiest country won’t be the one that has no heroes, or which needs to create them, but one that remains myopic and amnesiac about its real heroes, or turns them into cassandras. Consider the curious case of SUPARCO (Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission), Pakistan’s Space Agency, which was founded before ISRO by the physics Nobel Laureate Abdus Salaam. Islamabad launched its first sounding rockets to space before India in 1962, becoming the third Asian country. However, SUPARCO as well as the country it represents today is a basket case today that survives on bailout-to-bailout, and in the words of former diplomat Hussain Haqqani is forever trapped ‘between the mosque and the military’. Abdus Salaam, Pakistan’s only science Nobel laureate till date, was hounded and vilified in his home country for being an Ahmedi, which is equivalent to being an apostate in the Islamic Republic, or in simpler terms, for not being a ’true Muslim’ in the ‘Land of the Pure’. Pakistan, predictably, celebrated Abdul Qadir Khan, a nuclear physicist, who migrated there not immediately following the partition but, five years later, in 1952 at the age of 16. He is notorious as the global nuclear proliferator who stole centrifuge designs from the Netherlands, and later on went to sell nuclear blueprints and enrichment secrets, all the way from Baghdad to Tripoli. His motivation was to create the ‘first Islamic Bomb’ that can annihilate ’enemies of the faithful’ in the eventuality of a mortal combat. Starker contrast cannot be there in terms of how a nation is defined for generations to come in terms of who it to valorize, and who it prefers to demonise. With all eyes on the Indian space programme now, and The New York Times praising it, a far cry from the 2014 cartoon that played on neo-imperialist stereotypes to the hilt, mocking the Mars Mission, the Mangalyaan, EP Thompson, the British Marxist Historian, couldn’t have been more right that ‘India is the most important country for the future of the world’.

The writer is a communications professional who is intrigued by the intersection of society, popular culture, technology, and history of ideas. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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