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‘Space technology must be used to improve living standards of people’

We’re an agency doing things differently

Illustration: Ian Johnson

We are in an interesting situation today, where many private players are entering the space technology business. Whether it’s space commerce, space tourism, providing launch capabilities for cargo or even a one-way trip to Mars, government-run space agencies actually need to look at these developments as a threat to their activities. A threat not so much in terms of delivering services, however, because government agencies still need to provide services for societal good.

But the cost of access to space is going to be reduced because we will be able to reuse certain things. We need to take cognisance of this. Heritage can no longer be quoted as advantage.

Today we have 30 satellites in operation—13 for communication, 13 for remote sensing and four for navigation. We are in a unique position, where many of these are converging and we are finding a lot of newer applications. For example, we are working with the Department of Posts, which plans to link postmen with farmers so that periodic data on crops is collected to help farmers determine crop insurance.

Mangalyaan—the Mars mission that evoked such excitement and praise from all quarters—and the concept of ‘frugal innovation’ we are credited for having used, was mostly to do with the constraints within which we had to accomplish the task. Let’s say you have a high compound wall before you and you somehow want to go to the other side. If you are not tall enough to do a high jump, you can find a stick to do a pole vault across the wall. Basically, if you have the desire to perform a certain task, you try to make it possible. For Mangalyaan, we had the PSLV launch vehicle, which has its capabilities and limitations. We had geostationary satellites and other propulsion systems, but we had to try to work out a mission: how to make an object—that fits in a cube measuring 50km—travel 250 million km, into space? Think of the actual scenario—we had a payload that can only launch 1,350kg, with limited fuel. This was a huge challenge, but people took it up.

Also, our space probe had to travel nine whole months instead of the usual one-month our team was used to. We launched Mangalyaan in November 2013 and only in September 2014 was it inserted into the Mars orbit—what we call the Transmars injection. For us, the challenge was that this time, the system had to be restarted and re-energised after nine months.

Is ISRO’s cost-consciousness an Indian thing? Well, I would say it is an ISRO thing!

Funding was never an issue; for us, the roadblock in the path of frugal innovation was time. The opportunity to go to Mars with the minimum amount of accessible fuel comes once in 23 or 26 months. If we had missed 2013, we would have had to wait till 2016. These windows of opportunity, as we call them, were the one thing that constantly drove the mission. If we had sufficient fuel that we could carry on the satellite, we wouldn’t have worried. In our case, we had just enough fuel for it to reach and then deliver the Transmars injection.

Is ISRO’s cost-consciousness an Indian thing? Well, I would say it is an ISRO thing! We have been on this path from the time the father of India’s space programme, Vikram Sarabhai, conceived the idea of harnessing this new technology. While countries like the US and Russia were thinking of how their military prowess could be increased with this new tech, Sri Sarabhai spoke with deep conviction about how space technology must be used to improve living standards of people in the country.

So the gist is this. Whatever technology is accessible, we use. What we don’t have, we try to build on our own, with minimum expenditure. Cost-consciousness is in our DNA. So is constant innovation. Today, NASA is working with us for the NASA-ISRO synthetic aperture that will be launched in 2020-21. The success of projects like these has pushed many countries to interact with us. They realise that we’re an agency doing things differently.

You have to challenge your workforce constantly. When we do interplanetary missions, we are challenging the community working here. We also ought to mention the role and support of Prime Minister Modi—he’s been a big promoter of space technology. If ISRO had access to more funds, would we have done things differently? No, but we would surely have done many more things. Our emphasis has always been on how we can provide to the government a RoI that is visible on the ground.

Kiran Kumar is Chairman,  Indian Space Research Organisation

As told to Vasanthi Hariprakash.

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