‘There is a fundamental joy in exploring our universe, but it comes with great responsibility’

(From left) Satish Dhawan at Govt College, Lahore 1940; at IISc Bangalore, 1951; and ISRO, Bangalore 1980. Courtesy: Dhawan Family Collection

India on August 23, 2023 became only the fourth country in the world to land a spacecraft on the Moon. It also became the first country to soft land on the lunar south pole.

The Chandrayaan-3 Mission, coming four years after the failure of Chandrayaan-2 in 2019, has now put India in the company of the United States, the former Soviet Union and China, the other three countries to ever land spacecrafts on the Moon.

Down To Earth caught up with biologist Jyotsna Dhawan, daughter of the late Dr Satish Dhawan, on memories of Dhawan, a teacher, scientist and institution-builder as well as one of the pioneers of the Indian space programme. Edited excerpts:

Rajat Ghai (RG): When you look at the Indian space economy today, as exemplified by Chandrayaan-3 this week and the years when your father was building the Indian space programme, what do you feel?

 

Jyotsna Dhawan (JD): Thanks for inviting me to speak to Down To Earth. Before I get to your question, I just wanted to say that I will refer to my father by his name: he was pretty informal and he always signed his letters in his first name. So, when we children were old enough to leave home, we started calling him ‘Satish’. In fact, even his grandchildren called him by his name, which may seem quite strange in our culture because elders are always referred to by an honorific.

But my father believed that respect didn’t lie in such things, but in one’s actions. So, I will refer to him as ‘Satish’, just as we did during his lifetime.

Satish would have been completely delighted by the Chandrayaan success story and I offer my congratulations to the whole of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

When I look at the space programme today, I mostly feel amazed and tremendously excited by the progress. As you know, I am not an expert in this area, so my reactions are just those of a space enthusiast, like millions of others. No doubt I had little choice in becoming a space fan, being brought up on a daily dose of excitement about the cosmos. I think the flawless deployment of the Vikram Lander carrying the Little Moon Rover (‘Pragyan’) was just a treat to watch.

Many things go through one’s mind when one witnesses such feats.

I think of how difficult it is to plan and coordinate such a complex mission with so many moving parts; how many engineers and scientists and industries have to be working seamlessly as a team.

How do you overcome the terrifying possibility that anyone of a million failure points can trip up the whole mission while the whole world is watching?

An organisation like ISRO has come to represent the very best of what people can do while working together. Contemplating the exploration of space has given us two things simultaneously: pride in belonging to a society where scientific understanding is valued and also inspiration for us to move beyond ourselves.

RG: Dr Dhawan wanted to use space technology and exploration for the betterment of his fellow Indians. Do you think our achievements on the space front reflect that?

JD: Let us just enumerate all the ways in which space-based technologies impact our everyday life.

Can we live without the speed and diversity of information that we can access anytime, anywhere?

Whether it is a question of access to government programmes, education, GPS systems for travel, Earth observation, remote sensing satellites not only provide us with natural resource assessment and agricultural related information, but also disaster prediction and management, including information that actually allows the updating of policies to do with land use, the impact of climate change, etc.

All aspects of space technology are so deeply integrated into our everyday lives that we just take them for granted.

I grew up in the 1960s, a time when placing what used to be termed a ‘trunk call’ was a mission in and of itself, and even that was only used to communicate news that was either extremely joyous or sad. The idea that you could use a mobile telephone to chitchat with someone about the weather or to watch a clip from the latest movie, or to fix up your daughter’s school admission or find the best biryani restaurant while travelling in a car,  would have been considered quite mad.

But there are also more deeply important ways in which telecommunications improve lives: telemedicine, education, the collection and analysis of very large sets of data.

I think it is very important to also realise that ISRO earns substantial foreign exchange  revenue from its space-based imaging data. And that is all before we even come to the mind-expanding inspiration that comes from exploring our natural world around us and I think we can’t put a monetary value on that.

Just think of all the kids all over India who are so fired up about science after watching Vikram land on the moon and the little Pragyan Rover trundling out to explore its surroundings 300,000 miles away. It is the stuff of dreams.

RG: Dr Dhawan was against the militarisation of space. Do you feel that such militarisation is taking place now? 

JD: Both Vikram Sarabhai and Satish were convinced about the peaceful uses of sophisticated science. They were both members of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. 

I believe that while working to ensure that the Indian space program was predominantly under civilian control, they would both have been pragmatic about the obvious strategic and military applications.

Let us go back a little bit in history and see where modern space technology came from. Rockets were first built as weapons in medieval China, and right here in India, Tipu Sultan used rockets to fight the British in 18th century.

So, in fact, the modern space faring launch vehicles actually evolved from missiles, not the other way round.

I find it quite ironic that a single individual, the German scientist Wernher von Braun who was responsible for the development of the V2 rocket that killed thousands during the Blitz in World War II, was the same man who was instrumental in designing NASA’s super powerful Saturn V rocket that took Neil Armstrong to the moon. One of the most inspiring events in space history.

These are two radically different outcomes of the same fundamental technology. So, rockets have always been missiles. In our own time, think of the shift of APJ Abdul Kalam from his successful demonstration of SLV 3 to the Agni programme of DRDO. Perhaps a natural progression.

The recent creation of a defence space agency in India integrating all three armed forces is probably a reflection of the reality of geopolitics, in which nations will always have to be aware of their strategic position. Here, citizens and civil society have a vital role to make sure that situations that demand the use of these powerfully destructive technologies are never allowed to develop.

I believe that the perspective that the founders of the program had about using space-based means to address concrete problems and improve peoples’ lives, still holds true. These issues are global, because problems like climate change for example, impact every sphere of life, and the guiding principles for applying space-based technology must be arrived at by mutual understanding of our shared fate.

RG: Also, what about the global space race itself? It was there between the US and the USSR in Dr Dhawan's time. It is there today? Should we view it positively or negatively?

JD: You know, I am not an expert in this area. Obviously, competition of any kind spurs all participants to greater effort, but the trajectory of competition, especially in powerful technologies, can be deleterious, if it is not combined with a great deal of generosity and understanding rather than pure one-upmanship.

I think this is particularly true of any advance that has strategic implications. So, I would hope that we can view these global efforts as contributing to the overall understanding of the natural world and its peaceful applications to improving people’s lives and inspiring them to be more curious rather than purely competitive for its own sake. One would hope that international treaties such as the Artemis accord, to which India is a signatory would ensure a cooperative approach to space exploitation.

RG: What, in your view, can today's Indian space scientists and those entering the field do to remain true to his legacy?

JD: The context of the early achievements of the space program really need to be seen in the manner that all those involved were inspired by wanting to deliver something much larger than themselves. Sarabhai, Satish, UR Rao, Kalam, Aravamudam, BrahmPrakash, Kasturirangan and so many, many more- they poured themselves into their work. So their shared legacy really is this: if you’re going to do something, do it with every fibre in your being.  And I think I see that with ISRO today as well: they work real-time in the full glare of public scrutiny, to deliver their mission, and the inevitable failures are converted into new knowledge and achieving their goals.

Satish was fully convinced of the importance of scientific understanding for its own sake. But he never lost sight of the application to human well-being, to social issues, to social justice.

Also, I think he was keenly aware of the moral ambiguities that come with an ever-greater control over nature.

Legacies are important only in as much as reflecting on them gives people a greater understanding of their own purpose. If I can single out one aspect of his leadership style, it is that of respecting people for who they are and what they do, not where they come from or who their family is. When you are looking backwards with hindsight, you can see signs of greatness in a successful leader. But when I think about the young Satish Dhawan in Lahore in 1940 searching for a path to follow, he had absolutely no idea that he would one day be remembered for his contributions. I hope young people reading this will remember that who they are destined to become is absolutely wide open, and it is their effort that will make it happen.

As a biologist, I appreciate everyday how living organisms can only function as coordinated collectives of all the cells in their body. So I want to offer you a universal image of human achievement, which is only possible by invoking the collective, something that reminds us that we are not just individuals or men and women or Indians, but human.

I refer to the Pale Blue Dot, which is the picture taken by Voyager in 1990. Thirteen years after it was launched, this wonderful little spacecraft, which was engineered by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had passed by all the planets on its outward journey across the solar system.

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA's Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. Photo Credit: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/

Carl Sagan persuaded NASA to ask Voyager, which had until then been sending us images of the universe ahead, to turn around and take a picture of our home. The iconic image shows a single pale blue pixel that represents Earth. That backward glance shows us two things simultaneously: our own infinitesimally small place in the universe, and the fact that our species is the only one that can conjure the means to take that unimaginable outward journey and then look back at ourselves.

I think there is a fundamental joy in exploring our universe, but it comes with great responsibility.

Voyager is still sending back data 45 years after it was launched out to explore the unknown. I think we have a universe of possibility before us, so I want to congratulate ISRO again for opening our eyes.

(This article is based on Jyotsna Dhawan’s conversation with Rajat Ghai)

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