DELHI — Let’s send a mission to Mars, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced a couple of weeks ago, just as his government was fending off corruption charges and the country was still recovering from the biggest blackout since the invention of electricity.
Although Singh’s $77 million plan did nothing to divert attention from his administration’s failings, it did focus some unfortunate attention on India’s space program, suggesting that what had been a fine endeavor to date has now been hitched to India’s dream of becoming a great power.
Since its creation in the 1960s, the program has had a reasonably successful record of placing communications, earth-mapping and meteorological satellites [pdf] in orbit around the Earth. For all the carping about such missions’ cost, especially given the poverty in India, they seem to have paid for themselves.
But the ambition of a Mars mission goes well beyond practical applications. It’s about basic science research and planetary exploration, as well as a very real, and ludicrous, race to space with China.
The Web site of the Indian Space Research Organization, the Indian equivalent of NASA, greets visitors with the face of Vikram Sarabhai, the founder of India’s space program, and this quote, “We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space-flight. But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the comity of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.”
Flaunting this is in keeping with the Indian habit of placing some people on a pedestal while ignoring what they actually say.
It’s still unclear what to make of India’s moves beyond the Sarabhai mandate so far. With Chandrayaan-1, India’s $90 million 2008-9 mission to the Moon, it succeeded in landing an unmanned probe, but technical failures reduced the mission’s lifetime from two years to 312 days. Hard questions about its shortcomings were evaded thanks to the success of NASA’s mineralogy mapping instrument, which was on board the Indian probe and provided evidence of water on the moon’s surface.
The objective of India’s latest mission is not to land on Mars — with NASA’s rover missions there that would be redundant — but to place a satellite in an elliptical orbit around the planet in order to identify the geological source of the methane that has been detected in the atmosphere.
A worthy scientific objective? Perhaps. But India’s mission to Mars seems to have been planned in a hurry, and by default. Until recently I.S.R.O. had been focused on another Moon mission, Chandrayaan-2, but repeated failures of its latest rocket have led to delays. The Mars mission was supposed to fill the gap.
It was also announced just months after the failure of a Chinese mission with a remarkably similar aim.
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This isn’t the first time India has tried to score points over China. Chandrayaan-1’s landing on the Moon in the autumn of 2008 — just one month after a Chinese astronaut performed a space walk — was touted as an achievement the Chinese had yet to match. Since then Indian scientists have announced plans to put men in low orbit around the Earth by 2016 and on the Moon by 2020 — five years before the Chinese are planning their own Moon walk.
Never mind that the Americans managed the feat almost half a century ago, Beijing and Delhi both foresee a 21st century very different from the 20th. Scientists in India are already talking about mineral exploitation and colonization on the Moon. It’s such hopes that suggest the real problem with the Mars mission: that its stated aims mask a grandiose ambition.
Hartosh Singh Bal is political editor of Open Magazine and co-author of “A Certain Ambiguity.’’