Author: Chaitanya Giri

Every time, a rocket is launched from the Xichang Space Launch Center, located in a populated and hilly terrain of the Sichuan province, the villages in its vicinity are exposed to a highly toxic combination of nitrogen tetraoxide and hypergolic (scientific jargon for a quickly igniting substance) hydrazine emitting out of falling expendable stages of its rocket. As the world anticipates increasingly frequent space launches, the global call for cleaner fuel alongside reusability of rockets is growing day by day. No, there is no regulation coming top-down from multilateral institutions or governments, it is the increasing competition that is making…

With the Chandrayaan-3 mission, India is demonstrating space capabilities that are going to give a terrific boost to its position as a major ‘cislunar economy’ player. When the success of becoming the first country to land near the lunar south pole was not enough, India announced that it had made the ~1.7-tonne lander, Vikram, hop for 40 cm from the lunar surface. If the genius tricks were not enough on the Moon, it is now announced by ISRO that the ~2-tonne propulsion module, that part of Chandrayaan-3, which transported Vikram and Pragyan to the Moon, has returned to Earth’s orbit.…

The National Aerospace and Space Administration of the United States is an institution of great admiration and aspiration among us Indians. We entertain ourselves with urban myths about NASA. We love to imagine that a certain percentage of the NASA workforce is Indian; we love to visualise that NASA often assists in deciphering queries of our cultural past; both untrue. Long ago, a well-celebrated scholar of comparative religion and mythology, Joseph Campbell, had said “Myths are public dreams and dreams are private myths.” NASA is part of a certain section of Indian public dreams. This is so because many of…

This week, the US-based space news portal SpaceNews, which has recently merged with its Canadian counterpart, SpaceQ, published some interesting insights from George Freeman, UK’s Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation. What Freeman said was entirely antithetical to the notion of Brexit. As is known, the UK has substantial stakes in the satellite internet company OneWeb – so does India’s Bharti Global – and the company was recently merged with French satcom giant Eutelsat. Now that OneWeb is a British-French company now known as OneWeb-Eutelsat, Freeman suggests that this new firm can join hands with the European Union,…

One of the biggest news coming out of the 7th India Mobile Congress has been the launch of Jio SpaceFiber by the leading Indian telecom service provider, Reliance Jio. Of course, those in this tight-knit space industry knew very well about the partnership between Jio and the Luxembourg-based SES Networks that was announced in 2022. But its demonstrative announcement at the India Mobile Congress, held at the recently-inaugurated Bharat Mandapam, is testimony to the potential convergence of new-age with the ancient Indian civilization thought of Antyodaya. In the SES-Jio partnership, SES will provide its O3b and the currently under-deployment O3b…

On October 20, 2023, Chinese Premier Li Qiang shared a podium with the unelected Prime Minister Anwar ul Haq Kakar on his visit to China. The two oversaw Pakistan officially agreeing to join the China-led International Lunar Research Station – China’s base on the Moon that it wants to operate with junior partners. The agreement was signed by Zhang Kejian, the administrator of China National Space Administration and Moin ul Haque, Pakistan’s ambassador to China. So, what do they get from each other? It is hard to determine the precise contributions of Pakistan’s space agency, SUPARCO, to the International Lunar…

For the past eleven years of going around India with my space advocacy, I have always said – we need to commercialise our space exploration technologies. Those who know me have heard me giving an example of the PTOLEMY instrument onboard the European Space Agency’s Philae Lander that descended onto comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. PTOLEMY was a gas chromatograph isotope-ratio mass spectrometer (GC-ir-MS) designed to analyse the isotopic composition of volatile compounds on the comet – the kind that differentiates between heavy (18O) and light oxygen (16O). PTOLEMY, a product of the UK-based Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the Open University…

While US President Joseph Biden and our Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a bilateral joint statement released during the former’s trip to New Delhi on the occasion of the 2023 G20 Summit, one announcement that caught attention was that about planetary defence – the act of defending territories against potentially hazardous objects (PHOs), including asteroids, comets and other small solar system bodies. The US government stated that it now supports Indian institutions to participate in asteroid detection and tracking via the Minor Planet Center, which operates in the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory precincts but is part of the Paris-based International Astronomical…

With Chandrayaan’s glorious landing near the south pole of the Moon, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has once again proven to be the cynosure of our Bharatiya eyes. Their business ethos, resourcefulness, and panache in executing critical projects are worthy of emulation by all working in the public sector. It has stayed meritocratic thanks to the customised technocracy its founders, Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai, insisted on before their boss – Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The institution succeeds because it has avoided even positive discrimination, giving it a talent that delivers when it matters. But who does it matter…

One must sincerely appreciate the Australian Space Agency’s (ASA) straightforwardness in calling a spade a spade. They are not feeling unnecessarily coy by pretending to be a civilian space agency with no instrumentality to take formal stances in the nation’s interest. A relatively new space agency, the ASA is assertive of its stance on global interests and its penchant for being a global ‘space situational awareness’ (SSA) police. ASA’s social media operators have made their purpose very clear, unlike those intellectually deficient social media managers of ISRO, who are childishly happy making some ‘jealous’ by sharing new Chandrayaan pictures. Australia…