A Vision for India: Why Not Go to Mars?

NEW DELHI â€" Leaving no room for extraterrestrials to have false hopes, the motto of the Indian Space Research Organization is very specific: “In The Service Of Human Kind.”

November will mark 50 years since India sent a rocket into space for the very first time, a research projectile that was launched from a quiet fishing village in southern India, terrifying many who prayed for pardon from their gods as they watched the orange vapor trail of the Nike-Apache rocket climbing to an altitude of about 200 kilometers, or 125 miles. If everything goes according to plan, in November, as if in tribute to the origins of its space program, India will send a mission to Mars that will orbit the Red Planet.

The stated objectives of the 4.5 billion rupee, or $70 million, mission are to ascertain whether India can indeed send a spacecraft into orbit around Mars, and to study the planet’s atmosphere and geology so that India could one day mine Mars and even send willing Indians there. And, of course, to detect evidence of life.

Since its very beginning, India’s space program has attracted two extreme reactions â€" that it is an important and honorable pursuit, which should make every Indian fiercely proud; and that it is a wasteful expenditure in a country where children die of starvation, a poor nation trying to compensate for its sense of smallness by assuming a phony machismo.

In 1969, India’s best-known cartoonist, R.K. Laxman, showed an average Indian being introduced to American space scientists as the best candidate to be sent to the moon. “This is our man!” the caption read. “He can survive without water, food, light, air, shelter. ... ”

That cartoon is not entirely irrelevant today, even as India is working on a project to send humans to space and bring them back.

India’s space scientists have consistently dismissed all questions about the value of their work as petty grudges of people who do not understand the value of their work. The scientists have considerable support among lay people, but even those who have affection for the space program find it hard to defend the Mars mission.

How can India talk about mining Mars when the fact is that it depends on exploitative foreign companies to mine its own real estate on Earth for minerals in the first place? And if science must be a serious Indian pursuit at all, as it has to be in any nation, should not India focus all its resources on, say, mosquito-borne diseases that have killed millions of Indians? Space exploration in the time of dengue does seem baffling at first glance, but then should a nation really imagine that all its great ambitions should ideally line up according to a hierarchy of grave social importance and take up only one project at a time?

Ramabhadran Aravamudan, who has now retired, joined the Indian space program more than five decades ago and was sent to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the United States for training. He was in its Wallops Test Range the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and was baffled that NASA did not declare a holiday. He told me that even though writers have used the expression “rocket science” to mean a great, complex type of intelligence, “rocket science is in many ways simpler than medical research and disease management. It is possible to have simple and clear goals in rocket science.”

Also, India’s space scientists have long pointed out that the country’s space program is not very expensive. This year the budget allocation to the Department of Space is 56.15 billion rupees. The travel bill for all Indian government employees alone in 2011-12 was 35.19 billion rupees and is expected to be more now.

The space program had impoverished beginnings by the Arabian Sea, inside a vacated Roman Catholic church in Thumba in southern India. So new and primitive was this science in India that its veterans are surprised it did not kill anyone. Once, three minutes before the scheduled launching of a small test rocket, a scientist pressed the siren switch to warn the local fishermen, as was the norm then, but the switch launched the rocket.

In the late 1960s, the founder of the Indian space program, Vikram A. Sarabhai, a hero in an age when scientists could be heroes even in India, learned that a new satellite telemetry and tracking station was being auctioned off as scrap in northern Australia. He sent two scientists to the Reserve Bank of India to procure a blank foreign exchange demand draft. It was a time when it was almost impossible for Indians to take dollars out of the country, and the request for a blank demand draft seemed so ridiculous to one of the bank officials that he asked the two to leave.

From the very beginning until 2008, when India sent up a lunar orbiter that disappeared halfway into its intended mission life, the nation’s space program was preoccupied with the practical task of launching cheap and locally made communications and weather satellites. The program also acquired a moral facade, which every major Indian science project is forced to acquire, of helping the poor. This the program did by using its satellites to connect remote Indian villages to the rest of the nation, and by being the eye in the sky during natural calamities.

The moon and the Mars missions, as they did not have the ruse of immediate practical applications, had to face various forms of criticism, all of which raised the same familiar question: “Why is a poor country doing this?”

Raj Chengappa, a journalist who has covered the space program for several years, is among those who find criticism of the program “short-sighted.” When the time comes for humanity to decide what on Mars belongs to whom, he told me, “India has the chance to be at the high table.”

Part of the criticism against the Mars mission is not so much an indictment of India’s space program as it is a lament against India. The inescapable question is why does primary health care in India not have the sort of scientist-hero founder, the dedicated researchers and the extraordinary government support that its space program has enjoyed? Was it just that rocket science, despite what writers who majored in humanities imagine, truly is simpler than the war against the mosquito?

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 12, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune. \n \n\n'; } s += '\n\n\n'; document.write(s); return; } google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; google_ad_client = 'nytimes_blogs'; google_safe = 'high'; google_targeting = 'site_content'; google_hints = nyt_google_hints; google_ad_channel = nyt_google_ad_channel; if (window.nyt_google_count) { google_skip = nyt_google_count; } // -->