THE MOON WALKER
HE ASKED FOR THE MOON...AND GOT IT. NOW HIS TEAM IS AIMING FOR THE SUN, MARS, A MANNED FLIGHT AND INDIA’S OWN PIT-STOP IN SPACE
INDIA WILL HAVE ITS OWN INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION up there by 2035. As Sreedhara Panicker Somanath put out this picture, profound and seductive at once, he was capping off an extraordinary year for himself and the team he led as India Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman. The boxes ticked for 2023 would do any posse of space scientists proud: a moon landing, a solar mission and a test flight (with a robot on board) for a future manned space foray. The exuberant man at the centre of it all, who started his journey at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram in 1985 as an aerospace engineer and rocket technologist, is now steering ISRO’s most ambitious endeavour yet: sending an Indian to the moon, a natural scaling up from Chandrayaan-3.
When Somanath’s tenure began, in January 2022, it was a critical time for ISRO. Its human space mission, Gaganyaan, had suffered major setbacks. Launch failures, the disastrous end of Chandrayaan-2 in 2019 and Covidwrought disruptions had all created a gnawing anxiety and dejection. But he set a scorching pace, and the bad memories were laid to rest as ISRO’s Vikram lander executed a perfect soft landing on the moon surface, making India only the fourth country to achieve this after the US, Russia and China. It was also the first to do it on the lunar south pole.
The mood stayed buoyant as AdityaL1, the solar mission, launched on September 23 (it’s anticipated to reach its halo orbit, the Lagrange Point, about 1.5 million km from Earth, on January 6). And trials for Gaganyaan began in October—its upcoming second phase includes launching Vyommitra, a humanoid robot with a female appearance, into space. A Low Earth Observatory developed jointly by NASA and ISRO will also be up early 2024. The Venus mission, Shukrayaan, is likely to be launched before 2024-end. Somanath’s December 23 prophecy about an international space station caps all that. ISRO’s challenges are many: India accounts for a mere two per cent of the global space economy, and Somanath wants to see it nearly quadrupled to Rs 60,000 crore in his tenure. ■
Somanath says he wants to grow the country’s Rs 16,000 crore space economy at least four-fold in the near future