Will Bizarre Things Happen When India Reaches the Moon?

By launching the moon mission, Chandrayaan 1, on 22nd October 2008, India has announced her intention of being recognized as a modern 21st century country.

The popular image of India in Western media is hungry and poor people struggling to survive in pathetic slums in Mumbai, one of the horrendously congested polluted cities. When India, and not an affluent ‘developed’ nation, sends lunar probes, this seems to aggravate some people. They argue that India should remove poverty and feed everyone rather than spend money on space exploration.

Others see this view as patronizing and argue that India has the same rights as all countries to pursue scientific research, which will benefit even the poorest through application of technological advances. They further claim that the US Apollo programme spurred great innovative leaps in avionics, telecommunications and computer technology, which have all contributed towards improving society and raising living standards.



Is going to the moon still a matter of prestige?

The race to space started after World War II. In addition to boosting national prestige through propaganda, US Apollo Programme objectives were military and technological as well as scientific.

For USA, Soviet Union, Russia and now China and India, the space programme is of great prestige value.

President Kennedy is said to have confused NASA director James Webb by saying “Everything we do ought to really be tied in to getting on to the moon ahead of the Russians, otherwise we shouldn't be spending that kind of money, because I'm not interested in space. The only justification for the cost is because we hope to beat the USSR to demonstrate that instead of being behind by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.”[i] Finally the Americans, as the only country to date, managed to land men on the moon on 20th July 1969.

Going to the moon first was a matter of prestige and not for staking a claim to territory. After landings on the Moon, the United States explicitly disclaimed the right to ownership of any part of the Moon.



What happened When Other Countries Reached the Moon?

In 1957, when the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite Sputnik I, the constant beeping of the radio beacon as Sputnik passed overhead every 96 minutes, demonstrated to the world the technological superiority of the Soviet Union. This really made the American go full throttle on all efforts to reach the moon.

In only about six years after the first human landing on the moon in July 1969, the Space race ended officially with the Apollo-Soyuz docking in 1975. The general people and the administration in USA lost interest in space and the moon. Political thinking overrode scientific thinking. President Nixon had the Apollo 17 launch postponed, as he feared an accident would jeopardize his re-election.

In China, the Beijing government used the Chang’e and later the spacewalk to show that China had arrived as a superpower. Change’s mandate is also a military one as it aims to exploit the known huge lunar reserves of helium-3 as a nuclear fusion power plant fuel as disclosed by Ouyang Ziyuan, the foremost Chinese expert in underground nuclear testing and extraterrestrial materials.

In Japan, JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, had a "Wish Upon the Moon" campaign in 2007, which collected 412,627 names and messages taken to the moon along with scientific instruments.

 

Future Lunar Missions Planned

USA and Russia, and Japan, ESA (European Space Agency), China and India have pursued space exploration and there has even been much cooperation among them.

USA will send the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2009 to photograph and measure previous landing sites. One possible aim is to silence conspiracy theories, which claim that all lunar landings were filmed in studios.

ESA (European Space Agency) Aurora Programme plans a moon-landing mission by 2024. India plans to place a robotic rover on the moon by 2010/2011, a manned spaceflight by 2014 and moon landing by 2020.

China already has the lunar orbiter, Chang'e orbiting around the moon. China plans a moon landing together with Russia by 2020.  Japan already has two lunar spacecrafts orbiting the moon and is planning a lunar base by 2030.

 

Will the Moon Mission Change India?

Will the results of lunar/space exploration affect scientific progress so that innovations and advances can be translated into mass production very quickly? This is very difficult to say at short notice. Another difficulty is how do we determine if such technological advances actually result only from space programmes and not from other fields.

Mobile phones are a great leap forward and is changing India as telephone connections have for the past fifty years been a real nightmare in India. Would any technological advance be comparable to mobile phones or computers in general? This is very difficult to say.

Would the moon missions trigger a technological and arms race with China or a race to conquer the moon for its mineral deposits? That unfortunate outcome is also possible.

At least a significant effect would be the morale boost to the educated populace of India.  This could have a significant outcome on economic, social and political climate as national confidence increases. At least one group of people would be unquestioningly happy, philatelists or stamp collectors.

Reference: [i] From a tape recording in the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library.