‘Key to space ambitions’: India succeeds in historic space docking mission. space news
New Delhi, India – India successfully docked a satellite with another on Thursday morning, joining a small group of elite spacefaring nations to have achieved the complex technological feat in zero gravity.
Only the United States, Russia, and China have carried out space docking missions, which allow separate satellites to work as a team, coordinate their actions, and share resources that a spacecraft needs. But cannot be taken.
The Indian mission, called Space Docking Experiment (Spadex), lifted off on December 30 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in the country’s southern Andhra Pradesh state carrying two satellites, Chaser and Target.
Like India’s previous headline-grabbing space ventures – from landing on a challenging side of the Moon to launching a Mars mission – Spadex was built and delivered to space on a shoestring budget.
Space observers and astrophysicists told Al Jazeera that the docking expertise was “extremely important” to India’s space ambitions and upcoming missions. But why is it such a big deal?
Where does this place India compared to space superpowers? And how does India keep its space costs down?
What did SpaDeX do?
The Chaser and Target each weigh approximately 220 kg (485 lb). The two satellites became separated in space after being launched together on December 30.
They flew 470 km (292 miles) above Earth, where they were carefully placed in the same orbit – but about 20 km (12 miles) apart. There, they tested a variety of maneuvers in preparation for docking.
Then, the chaser slowly moved toward his partner, the target, before mating in the early hours of Thursday. The docking attempt was initially scheduled for January 7, but was delayed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) after drift between the twin satellites became excessive.
Celebrations took place at ISRO headquarters, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi also congratulated the space agency for “successful demonstration of space docking of satellites”.
Modi described the docking as “an important step for India’s ambitious space missions in the coming years.”
Why is docking important?
Ahead of the mission, Jitendra Singh, India’s Minister of Science and Technology, said the mission was “crucial to India’s future space ambitions”. Singh was referring to a series of projects launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), including sending a man to the Moon by 2040, building India’s first space station and sending an orbiter to Venus.
Docking technology will be critical in providing critical facilities to the space station and crew missions, including refueling in orbit and assembling heavy infrastructure in microgravity.
“ISRO has demonstrated that it is good at launching things into orbit and landing as well,” said astrophysicist Somak Roychowdhury, vice-chancellor of Ashoka University on the outskirts of New Delhi. “Now, docking is an important part of upcoming missions – and ISRO is now moving forward at a very important level.”
In August 2023, the Indian mission Chandrayaan-3 became the world’s first mission to land near the Moon’s south pole. Since then ISRO’s ambitions kept increasing. The next phase of the lunar mission – Chandrayaan-4 – will involve a capsule that will collect samples from the Moon and then dock with a return spacecraft for the journey back to Earth.
“Missions like Chandrayaan-4 are so complex that they cannot be launched simultaneously. It is very heavy and the pieces need to be combined in space before landing on the Moon to extract lunar rocks,” explained Raychaudhuri.
Roy Chowdhury said that by demonstrating its docking capabilities, ISRO was also able to provide services to others.
Pallav Bagla, co-author of Reaching for the Stars: India’s Journey to Mars and Beyond, agreed that “ISRO needs to master this technology for future missions.”
A unique contribution to the SpaDeX mission is the inclusion of two dozen experiments by non-governmental entities, including space-technology startups and academic institutions.
Pawan Goenka, chairman of the Indian National Space Agency, India’s space regulatory body, said, “By making this platform accessible (to the private sector), we are lowering the entry barriers and creating an environment for entities to contribute to the space sector.” Enabling a wide range of applications.” Authority Centre.
Bagla agreed.
“It is no longer a space organization of the Government of India,” he said of ISRO. “It is now an Indian space ecosystem in which you have ISRO as the main player which is now managed by private start-ups and institutions. Used to be.”
‘Innovation, not austerity’
While ISRO keeps looking for the stars, a report by market intelligence platform Traxon said funding in India’s private space sector is set to decline by 55 per cent in 2024 from $130.2 million in 2023 to $59.1 million in the last five years. The first fall in. , (Reuters reported that the decline comes amid a global 20 percent decline in space sector investment.)
Meanwhile, government funding for the Indian space agency has increased. Following the historic landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the Moon and the launch of the solar probe, Aditya-L1, the Government of India allocated the largest fund ever allocated by the country for future space projects – ₹10 billion ($116 million) – The announcement was made in October last year.
However, experts told Al Jazeera that these amounts of money are still minimal given the complexities and ambitions of the upcoming projects.
The country’s space agency had earlier spent $74 million on sending a spacecraft to Mars and $75 million on Chandrayaan-3 last year. For comparison, NASA’s Mangalyaan in 2013 cost $582 million, while Russia’s lunar mission, which crashed two days before Chandrayaan-3’s landing, cost $133 million. Or take a look at the budgets of famous space-oriented thrillers like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar ($165 million) and Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity ($100 million).
But is this a feature or a bug of the Indian space programme?
Mylaswamy Annadurai, who worked at ISRO for 36 years and served as director of its satellite centre, recalled the famous photographs of Indian scientists carrying rocket parts on bicycles before the country’s first rocket launch in 1963 .
Recalling a conversation with APJ Abdul Kalam, Annadurai told Al Jazeera, “After realizing his vision with respect to education, health care, weather forecasting and monitoring of natural disasters, ISRO realized that it could not fulfill those dreams.” It’s time to move forward that no one even dared to see.” , a renowned aerospace scientist and former President of India. “The next generation, we, thought – ‘Why can’t we go further than this?'”
Annadurai led India’s first deep space mission, Chandrayaan-1, which discovered significant lunar water on the Moon – and earned him the title of India’s “Moonman”. He was also tasked with preparing project reports including budget demands from the government.
“I knew very, very clearly that we cannot demand a budget beyond the scope of the Government of India. I needed to justify the cost to policymakers,” he said, explaining the rationale for spending a fraction of what other space-going nations spend on missions.
“I know my father’s abilities to raise funds for my higher education,” Annadurai said with a laugh. “We bound ourselves to make the mission (Chandrayaan-1) possible within that budget (3.8 billion rupees ($44 million)) – and the question of ‘how’ led to simpler methods.”
This way.
“We built and flew only one hardware module, unlike four to five testers from other agencies,” Annadurai said, listing cost-cutting methods by India’s space scientists. “Using modest launch vehicles, simple designs, charting long and slow journeys and using small amounts of fuel.”
Then he joked.
Annadurai then laughed and said, “We are second to none in terms of space programs, but when it comes to salaries we are behind everyone else,” and that’s a good reason for the low costs.
For Roy Chowdhury of Ashoka University, “Jugaad” (an informal Hindi word meaning an approach to solving a problem using simple resources) is “one of the distinguishing features of ISRO missions”.
Yet he believes the focus on ISRO’s low-budget successes is also a legacy of the Western media’s historical criticism and mockery of India’s space efforts. In 2014, after India launched a robotic probe to Mars, The New York Times published an infamous cartoon showing a farmer with a cow knocking on the door of a room marked “Elite Space Club”, where Well suited people sit. The cartoon was described as “racist” and the newspaper apologized after the controversy.
“We keep trying to prove that we are doing it at a lower cost. ISRO has innovative approaches and ensures that resources are used in a very frugal manner,” said Raychaudhuri.
But ISRO should also be appreciated for its innovations, he said.
“This fixation on the budget is now becoming a hindrance,” Raychaudhuri said.
“Innovation should be ISRO’s identity, not austerity.”
