Susmita Mohanty wears many hats: spaceship designer, serial entrepreneur, and space diplomat. She is co-founder and director-general of Spaceport SARABHAI (S2), India’s first space-focused think-tank, which she founded in 2021. Ms. Mohanty has spent more than 25 years in the international space sector working with the Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Russians, and Indians in various capacities, and is invested in India’s transformation into a developed space economy, gender parity in the space ecosystem, and space sustainability. During an interview in her home in Bengaluru, she spoke to The Hindu about her disappointment with women being excluded from the process of choosing astronauts for the Gaganyaan’s first crewed mission, India’s place among spacefaring nations, and what our fledgling space spart-ups need to thrive. Edited excerpts follow.

Having more women in space, especially in leadership roles, seems important to you. You recently wrote about how no woman was eligible to be considered for Gaganyaan’s debut flight since the candidates were required to be combat pilots of instructor grade, which ruled out women candidates.

My reaction to the all-male Gaganyaan astronaut selection was natural since I grew up in an India where women have always been part of the ISRO [Indian Space Research Organisation] workforce and have taken to science and engineering quite happily. ISRO has a good gender balance. If you talk to women scientists in ISRO, they will tell you they enjoy working there.  Besides, India has the highest number of women pilots in the world. Instead of celebrating that and letting them compete, we are just closing the gate on them. It doesn’t make sense. 

Due to advances in space technologies, flying to space is now accessible to ordinary citizens who haven’t been part of a military environment, which is why you have space tourists. Even if the [Gaganyaan] selection committee wanted to limit the first round to IAF pilots, they could easily have allowed the women IAF pilots to compete.

We have more than a hundred women non-combat (helicopter, transport) pilots because we started accepting women in the IAF [Indian Air Force] 30 years ago, in 1993. A retired IAF friend told me that we now have 19 women combat pilots since we started inducting them in 2016.  Not allowing our women pilots to compete was a huge missed opportunity for India.

I wish I didn’t have to write these articles in the first place. We have women who are qualified, capable, and raring to go. So why shut the gate on them? Stop being gatekeepers, let there be fair play.

Can you talk about your childhood in Ahmedabad, and how it shaped your imagination about space?

I was raised in what I call Sarabhai-and-Gandhi Ahmedabad, [which is] rather different from its contemporary avatar. My school principal was a Gandhian. Local industrial families were engaged in cultural philanthropy and institution building and promoted internationalism.

Among the many great institutions that nurtured my curiosity, creativity, and renaissance-upbringing were the School of Architecture (CEPT), Kanoria Arts Centre, National Institute of Design, Space Applications Centre, Physical Research Laboratory, Centre for Environment Education, Textile Research Association, and the Indian Institute of Management.

In my years since, I have lived in multiple cities in the U.S. and Europe. I have travelled the globe. Never have I come across a city that has so many institutes of excellence in such a small radius. Raised in a milieu of space pioneers and renowned contemporary architects, I was smitten with the idea of space architecture and design.

I was a hyper-motivated kid. While in high-school, armed with a bicycle, my dad’s portable German typewriter, and access to amazing libraries, I started working on design problems of living and working in microgravity. Back then there was no internet. So I would use Indian post to mail design ideas to NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and American universities. Some even responded from time to time. That kept me going.

Where does India stand today among spacefaring nations? What is the Indian space economy like compared to other countries, and the country’s potential in space research and exploration?

India has one of the oldest space programs in the world. We did our first sounding rocket launch in November 1963. Getting to a successful Moon landing has taken 60 years of hard work and perseverance with many milestones along the way. We launched our first satellite, Aryabhata, in 1975; had our first successful PSLV launch in 1993; and our first successful GSLV launch in 2001. We launched our first Moon mission in 2008 and Mars mission in 2013.

As an independent young nation, as we started to slowly recover from more than 200 years of colonial plundering, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had the foresight to commit a substantial chunk of our meagre funds to science and technology early on. That foundation is fundamental to who and where we are today, as a nation. Any country with an advanced space programme such as ours takes a good half a century to get there. Space technology is complex. 

At international space forum, when I hear anyone refer to India as an ‘emerging space nation’, I flinch. I always insist on setting the record straight. The level of ignorance, even arrogance is often staggering. The old space narrative has a strong Western bias because it was largely shaped by the Cold War and Hollywood films.

India ranks among the top six space-faring countries in terms of space capabilities, the others being the U.S., Russia, China, Japan, and France. If you count Moon landings, then France can be dropped from the list. Soon India will become one of four countries to have independent human spaceflight capability once we launch humans into low-earth orbit.

Some of us are working on crafting a new 21st-century space narrative to reflect the [space] power shift to the eastern hemisphere, with China, India and Japan leading the way.

In 2007, when I decided to leave San Francisco and move back to India, I wrote to my mentor Arthur Clarke about my decision. He wrote back saying, “That is very strategic.” When I asked him why he thought so, he wrote back saying, “Everything began in the East and is going back there.” He cited the example of Chinese alchemists having invented gunpowder and said, “No gunpowder, no rockets.”

As someone passionate about preserving the environment, both our own and in outer space, can you talk about the impact of space debris?

I worry about the Moon because it is back in the cross-hair of human exploration. The Moon’s pristine environment will most surely be impacted adversely by human greed and the need to monetise everything. Space agencies and private companies will not stop at exploration and will likely resort to [mass] extraction of resources. Some countries such as the U.S. and Luxembourg have unilaterally passed laws that will allow their private companies to extract and own space resources. The prospect of space mining is real.

That’s not all. Humans are good at littering – there is proof on earth and in low-earth orbit.

We have made low-earth orbit a dangerous place because of tonnes of debris generated due to human activities. Debris objects can be as small as a chip of paint or as big as a defunct satellite or a discarded solar panel. Debris statistics on the ESA’s website indicate we have around 36,000 objects larger than 10 cm, 1 million objects between 1 cm and 10 cm, and 130 million objects between 1 mm and 1 cm. Orbiting debris moves at 28,000 km/hour, so it packs a punch.

Some space debris burns up as it re-enters the atmosphere, some fall into the ocean, and some onto land. Not all debris re-entries are controlled. For example, NASA had jettisoned a large pallet of old batteries weighing roughly 2.6 tonnes from the orbiting International Space Station [ISS], intending for them to burn up on re-entry. A fragment survived the journey and crashed into a Florida home in March this year.

There are Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee [IADC] guidelines for post-mission disposal of space hardware, but not everyone follows these procedures

How can space play a role in monitoring the effects of the climate crisis?

Earth observation (EO) satellites don’t just help us monitor global warming and ice melts, they also help tackle the impacts of climate change. For example, my former company Earth2Orbit’s EO analytics business arm had developed models that used satellite imagery and advances in machine-learning analytics for use cases that could make cities ‘climate smart’, for example monitor pollution, heat islands, urban sprawl, underground water.

Further, space technology spin-offs and satellite services have applications that can benefit the environment. Satellite-based systems can be leveraged to help reduce vehicle emissions, make wind turbines more efficient, and help solar cells produce more energy.

Most applications use a cocktail of satellites for telecom, remote sensing, meteorology, and navigation. Companies involved in downstream applications are innovating and creating new services and products to mitigate climate change and to help people, for example farmers and fisher folk, cope with climate change.

I’d like to talk about your journey as a space entrepreneur, and the three start-ups you’ve founded on three continents: MOONFRONT in San Francisco, LIQUIFER in Vienna, and EARTH2ORBIT (E2O) in India. Why did you choose to go the entrepreneurial route?

I began my professional space journey in 1997 with a brief stint at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre. After that, I worked for the ISS programne at Boeing in southern California for almost three years. This gave me an in-depth understanding of how the space industry works.

In 2000, I left Boeing, moved to San Francisco, and started a boutique space consulting firm called MOONFRONT. I decided to become an entrepreneur because when you work for a space agency or a large company, you cannot speak your mind freely. You have to toe the line, more or less. I am the type who likes to ask questions and challenge the status quo.

Four years after MOONFRONT, I co-founded a space architecture and design firm called LIQUIFER with a friend in Vienna. LIQUIFER Systems Group, as it is now called, not only designs space exploration, habitation, and transportation systems but also makes full-scale prototypes and tests them in analogue environments.

In 2008, I moved back to India and started my third venture, EARTH2OBIT (E2O). E2O played a pivotal role in opening up the U.S. launch market for the ISRO’s PSLV rocket. We also developed EO analytics products for crop forecasting and making cities climate-smart.

In 2021, I co-founded India’s first dedicated space think tank. We provide research-based policy guidance to the government, give India an international voice, and push for reforms that can help India become a developed space economy.

There has been a lot of conversation around the privatisation of space in India. We are privatising space launches and are in the process of allowing FDI in the manufacture of satellites. Your thoughts?

Privatising routine satellite and rocket assembly for mature technologies could have started two decades ago. I am told there was reluctance and pushback from the government space agency. The fear of losing control was palpable. The fact that it is finally happening is good news. Not just privatisation but even commercialisation of ISRO-tech has started to get traction.

Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of space companies in India currently: the NewSpace start-ups, legacy companies big and small that have been catering to ISRO’s needs for several decades, and telecom companies such as Jio Satcom and the Bharti Group-backed OneWeb.

The space reforms announced by the Indian government in 2020 mark the beginning of a new phase in India’s space journey. Operationalising those reforms will take time, but it is a move in the right direction. There is now a space regulator called IN-SPACe that is the one-stop interface for space companies seeking licenses, access to environmental test facilities, and other forms of cooperation to get their businesses rolling.

What is missing is funding on the scale you find in developed space economies such as the U.S. SpaceX, for example, would not exist without the billions of taxpayer funds it gets from NASA and the DoD [Department of Defense]. An American EO satellite company’s largest customer is usually the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Reconnaissance Office. Similarly, our government needs to become an ‘anchor customer’ for our companies for them to scale and thrive. The government cannot expect our companies to run on private capital.

In 2023, IN-SPACe’s ‘Decadal Vision and Strategy for the Development of the Indian Space Economy’ claimed it will propel India’s fledgling space industry from $8.2 billion currently to $44 billion by 2033. The reality is quite humbling. In 2023, cumulatively our [250 or so] space start-ups raised a meagre $134 million.

This February, the government announced FDI [foreign direct investment] liberalisation for the space sector. The FDI money will come in only when we have absolute regulatory clarity, a somewhat evolved space insurance landscape, and better protection of intellectual property. We also need national space legislation, which is yet to happen. So there is a long way to go. We are just getting started.

Watch | 50 years ago, India conducted its first ever nuclear test

Fifty years ago, India conducted its first nuclear test in Pokhran, code-named Operation Smiling Buddha. With this India had entered the league of nations with nuclear capabilities.

An article dated May 19th, 1974, says India successfully conducted an underground test with plutonium device in 10-15 kiloton range. It also adds that the then Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Dr H.N Sethna and Director of The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre DR R Ramanna, who supervised the test, flew to Delhi even without a wash or change to give a full account to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

India said that it undertook this programme to develop its own technology for peaceful use of nuclear energy and it had no intention of going in for nuclear weapons. The groundwork for testing nuclear energy was laid even earlier by renowned Indian scientists Homi J Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai. In 1954, the Department of Atomic Energy was founded, with Bhabha as director.

With Smiling Buddha, India became the first nation to conduct a nuclear test apart from the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. After the nuclear test, there were criticisms that it was an attempt to divert people’s attention from the economic crisis the country was facing in the 1970s.

However, the Atomic Energy Commission chairman said that it was his decision and that there was no political motive,
Even a New York Times article said that “such great talent of resources has been squandered on the vanity of power, while 600 million Indians slip deeper into poverty”.

India also faced significant criticism from many countries including Pakistan, USA, and Canada. Pakistan said that it would never succumb to “nuclear blackmail” or accept “Indian hegemony or domination over the subcontinent”.

India did not carry out further nuclear tests until 1998. In 1998, under the leadership of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India conducted a series of nuclear tests in Pokhran once again, code-named Operation Shakti.

With this, India declared itself a full-fledged nuclear state.

Script and production: Gayatri Menon

Research: Gayatri Menon and Murali Krishnaswamy

Archive photo courtesy: M. Srinath

Voiceover: Jude Francis Weston

A memorable black-and-white photograph from the early days of the Indian space programme shows the nose cone of a small rocket being taken to the launchpad on the carrier rack of a bicycle. It’s an incongruous sight. All around the bicycle is the dusty, palm-bedecked rural India of the 1960s. Cut to 2023, and the image of a jubilant S. Somanath, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), declaring, “We have achieved soft-landing on the moon. India is on the moon.”

In the slow yet eventful decades separating the two images, the space programme evolved from what many perceived as the frivolous aspirations of an upstart, poverty-stricken third-world country to a sparkling example of scientific excellence that Indians can look up to. Truth is, the ISRO had made it to the elite space club much before the Chandrayaan-3 mission’s ‘Vikram’ lander touched down on the lunar south pole on August 23. The space agency has proved its capabilities time and again by placing satellites in precise orbits on modest budgets and embarking upon highly publicised missions to the moon (in 2008 and 2019) and Mars (in 2014).

In 2017, the ISRO turned up the heat on the space race by launching 104 satellites in one go on the 39th flight of its trusted Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). But beyond such immediately visible, high-profile achievements are the countless ways in which the ISRO and its home-grown technologies have touched the lives of the common people; be it weather forecasts, telemedicine, navigation or tele-education. It is this connect with the grassroots that has made ISRO a household name.

Second to none

Vikram Sarabhai, the driving spirit behind India’s space ambitions, was keen for India to be “second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society which we find in our country.” To him, the application of sophisticated technologies and methods of analysis “to our problems is not to be confused with embarking on grandiose schemes whose primary impact is for show rather than for progress measured in hard economic and social terms.” This is perhaps why it did not surprise anyone when the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), ISRO’s lead facility responsible for launch vehicles, including the hefty LVM3 which put Chandrayaan-3 in orbit last July, turned its skills to developing mechanical ventilators in the bleak days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But then, the beginnings of ISRO too were modest; on land relinquished by the fishing community and a local church in a little-known coastal village in Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram.

“A historic landmark in the entire process of land acquisition was the singular act of grace on the part of the Christian community at Thumba and the bishop of Thiruvananthapuram Rt Rev. Dr. Peter Bernard Pereira, in 1962. The venerated place of worship (the St. Mary Magdalene Church, now a popular space museum) was graciously laid at the altar of science,’’ the book A Brief History of Rocketry in ISRO, by P. V. Manoranjan Rao and P. Radhakrishnan, veterans of the space agency, notes. On November 21 this year, it will be 60 years since the first sounding rocket, an American-made Nike-Apache, lifted off from Thumba. Five years after that event, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in 1968, dedicated the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) to the UN.

Over the years, the space agency has had its ups and downs. The occasional mission setbacks aside, the ISRO was rocked by the spy scandal in the early 1990s and the Antrix-Devas case later on. Nevertheless, the agency has always displayed an ability to bounce back stronger. Today, the ISRO, with its many facilities spread over the country, has a pride of place among India’s government establishments. In the midst of institutions bogged down by laidback attitudes to work and bureaucratic lethargy, it is seen as one of the rare ones that can ‘’deliver.’’

By indigenously developing technologies like the cryogenic rocket engine and the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS – NavIC), often in the face of sanctions, it has demonstrated to the country’s larger scientific community that such things are not the exclusive, impregnable domains of the West alone.

Perhaps, this is ISRO’s greatest contribution to the country’s scientific community; a ‘work culture’, epitomised by an unwavering commitment to excellence and teamwork that can be traced back to the days of Sarabhai, Satish Dhawan and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

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