Monday briefing: The story of India’s space programme – and why it took off
Good morning.
Last week India became the fourth ever country to land a spacecraft on the moon, and the first to touch down successfully near its south pole. It was hailed as a success for “budget” missions, with the project costing £60m, less than half of the £131m it cost Christopher Nolan to make his 2014 space epic, Interstellar.
The triumph was greeted with wild excitement in India, with the prime minister, Narendra Modi, saying it “mirrors the aspirations and capabilities of 1.4 billion Indians”.
Others point out that 280 million of those Indian citizens still don’t have toilets, and perhaps Modi should fix that before funding further space exploration. In the UK, the usual voices are using the lunar landing to further their argument that we should stop sending aid to India.
But are such criticisms fair? For today’s newsletter I talked to Martin Barstow, professor of astrophysics and space science, and director of strategic partnerships at Space Park Leicester, which was opened by British astronaut Tim Peake last year.
In depth: ‘The money you spend in space pays people’s wages, creates jobs and supports economic growth’
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A short history of India’s space programme
India’s space programme was established in 1962, a year after John F Kennedy set a target to land an American on the moon by the end of the decade. But it wasn’t until the 1970s and 80s that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) really got going, using satellites to map and survey crops, monitor damage from natural disasters and erosion, and to bring telemedicine and telecommunication to remote rural areas.
The country now has one of the world’s largest space programmes. It designs, builds, launches, operates and tracks the full spectrum of satellites, rockets and lunar and interplanetary probes. It brings priceless prestige to India: witness Modi’s beaming face at the meeting of the Brics emerging nations this week, when he declared the lunar landing “the movement for new, developing India”. He resisted the temptation to draw comparisons with the Russian delegation’s effort – their Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the moon four days earlier.
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How India paid for it
In short, it operates to a tight budget and manages to outperform expectations. The ISRO has a reputation for parsimony, with Indian space scientists paid one-fifth of the global average, according to a former ISRO chair. And although India’s government allocated the equivalent of £1.3bn for the department of space for the fiscal year ending in March, it spent about 25% less. By contrast, Nasa has a £20bn budget for the current year.
In any case, Martin Barstow has no truck with the argument that it’s ridiculous for India to spend anything on space exploration when 10% of its population still live below the $2.15 a day poverty line.
“I see this argument all the time and it is really missing the point. The space science bit is a very small fraction of the programme,” says Barstow. Most of it is spent “keeping people alive” on Earth, he adds. “That’s helping people with agriculture, helping people in poor areas who don’t have good communication or infrastructure. It’s really about developing the country.”
He hears the same arguments in the UK. “People ask: ‘Why do we do space in the UK? We can spend that money building hospitals.’ But all the money you spend in space isn’t really spent in space. It is spent on the ground. It pays people’s wages, it develops hightech jobs. It supports economic growth. In the UK, space brings £17bn a year to the economy.”
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Is it time for the UK to stop sending aid to India?
The Foreign Office, which distributes aid, sent India £33.4m in cash in 2022/23. Former Brexit party MEP Ben Habib said the lunar landing showed it was time for the UK to stop sending India any money at all: “It is odd, to put it mildly, that the UK gives increasing amounts of aid to India, a country with a space programme and an economy bigger than our own,” he grumbled.
Barstow sees it differently: “We still need to support India, which remains a poor country,” he says. GDP per capita in India is £1,789, compared with £36,863 in the UK. Almost 20% of Indian households – about 280 million people – do not use any toilet facility, according to India’s national family health survey. Then there are arguments about the soft power that such aid allows the UK to wield and reparations owed to India due to the legacies of empire, neither of which claims are dented by India’s supposed extravagance in investing in space exploration.
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What next for India’s space ambitions?
Next, India wants to send three astronauts into space with a mission called Gaganyaan. Although an Indian flew to orbit on a Soviet spacecraft in 1984, the country has never managed this feat on its own. The project was scheduled to be complete by 2023 but has faced numerous delays.
It also hopes to launch another mission to Mars, after its Mangalyaan orbiter successfully observed the planet from 2014 to 2022. A solar observatory called Aditya-L1 is also in the pipeline, as well as an Earth observation satellite built jointly with Nasa.
What else we’ve been reading
Thomas Hobbs speaks to some of the biggest names in hip-hop to get their reflections on the defining moments of the genre over the last five decades. Nimo
“They see him as a spiritual leader, as a messiah.” Zoe Williams meetsAndrew Tate’s nemesis, Matt Shea, whose second documentary about the misogynistic kickboxer airs this week. Helen
For the New Yorker (£), Dhruv Khullar goes to extreme lengths to chronicle the impact of extreme heat on the human body, including putting himself in a 40C chamber while walking on a treadmill. A fascinating, terrifying read. Nimo
To hell with good intentions? Joel Snape asks whether you should worry about working out too hard. Helen
Two years after his 13-year-old daughter’s preventable death, Paul Laity reflects on his life without her. The article is in equal measure heartbreaking and revelatory as it describes the “litany of failures” in the hospital in the days before Martha’s death. Nimo
The front pages
The Guardian print edition begins the week with “Ultra-processed foods causing a ‘tidal wave of harm’, say experts”. “Great British food scandal” – that’s the Daily Mirror on this “processed hell” of our diet. “NHS ‘trying to erase women’” says the Daily Mail about something called the Rainbow Badge scheme, which it says is about removing gendered language from hospitals. The i has “Tory ‘big beasts’ facing wipeout at next election – as Dorries opens up new splits” while on the same theme the Daily Express says “Tory infighting will gift Labour the keys to No10”. “Electronic tagging plan to stop migrants fleeing” is the top story in the Times while the Daily Telegraph goes with “Braverman: police must investigate every theft”.
Lead story in today’s Financial Times is “China’s sluggish economy will weigh on global trade, western groups warn”.
Today in Focus
Revisited: Trafficked: Marta – part four
The story of a Ukrainian woman who escaped modern slavery in the UK. Annie Kelly reports
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The Upside A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Jimmy Lippert Thyden grew up in Virginia knowing he was adopted and that his biological family was from Chile. But he didn’t know that he had been taken away from his birth mother and, like 20,000 other babies during Augusto Pinochet’s regime, sold for profit.
With the help of an at-home DNA kit, he found his birth mother and in August met her for the first time in Chile with the words, “Hola, Mamá … Te amo mucho.” “Hello, Mom. I love you so much.”
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
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going through screening will be overdiagnosed with the disease.
From an NHS point of view, screening is very resource-intensive to deliver. Each person falsely flagged by screening requires further, more intensive, hospital tests – and uses hospital resources that can’t be used for someone else who has been correctly flagged.
If the NHS is going to massively expand screening, it needs sufficient resources to deliver not just the screening itself, but also the subsequent gold-standard testing and treatments. But the outlook is not good: latest NHS statistics show that cancer diagnosis and treatment targets have been breached more than a million times since October 2022. Diagnostic equipment such as MRI or CT scanners, and the staff to run them, are expensive resources and already stretched, with significant wait times.
Much less harmful in terms of screening is bowel cancer: it consists of sending a stool sample, taken at home, off for testing. If there are traces of blood in the sample, then you are offered a colonoscopy. It is almost impossible to be wrongly diagnosed with bowel cancer during a colonoscopy. The potential harm to a person from a bowel cancer screening is mainly limited to an unnecessary colonoscopy, while there is a large benefit in removing pre-cancerous growths and identifying cancers early.
But the NHS implications are a different matter. Extending bowel cancer screening in England to people in their 50s means almost doubling the number of people screened each year, to about 16 million. Given that fiftysomethings are about half as likely to develop bowel cancer or adenomas as people in their 60s, it also means screening many more people who do not have cancer or precancerous growths.
Even if the chance of incorrectly flagging a stool sample for a colonoscopy is only 1% (a conservative estimate), this could mean thousands more people referred each year for a colonoscopy they do not need. And colonoscopy services are already very stretched, coping with the pandemic backlog: around 40% of people in England are now waiting more than six weeks for a colonoscopy, up from around 35% in 2022. As it stands, it’s not clear how the NHS will be able to deliver these services to the new, lower age group in a timely manner without a large increase in funding and capacity.
There are similar issues with the new blood test for a range of 50 potential cancers. The test is intended to help diagnose people with non-specific symptoms that could signal cancer. But the NHS is trialling the test on 140,000 people without any symptoms and, if that trial is successful, hopes to extend that to a further million people over the next few years. Yet a recent UK study found that among participants with non-specific symptoms the false positive rate was about 1.5%. This means that thousands of people without cancer (1.5% of almost all those 1 million people the NHS is trialling) could be wrongly flagged for further gold-standard testing.
For the NHS, this means adding tens of thousands more people to the cancer diagnostic pathway. This will increase wait times for everyone – including those at a more advanced cancer stage – and reduce available resources elsewhere in the system.
The benefits, harms and costs of screening need to be transparently communicated to the public. At the moment, more screening is announced and reported as an obvious triumph, but if we want to actually improve cancer treatment in the UK, we have to have a deeper discussion on the best use of (currently) scarce resources.
Christina Pagel is professor operational research, UCL of