This month marks the 54th anniversary of the first manned landing on the Moon, where Neil Armstrong uttered those immortal words – “this is a small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind”. Although no man has landed on the Moon since 1972, when the US Apollo missions ceased, the US, Russia and China have sent many unmanned probes to the lunar orbit and to the Moon itself in the five intervening decades.
With the successful landing by the Chandrayaan-3 (literally lunar spacecraft) probe, India has become only the fourth country to send a robotic probe to the Moon. Significantly, it landed on the Moon’s largely unexplored South Pole, a first by any country. The successful landing was significant from another perspective – a previous attempt by India’s Chandrayaan-2 ended in a crash landing in 2019.
“This success belongs to all of humanity and we can all aspire for the Moon and beyond,” said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Johannesburg, congratulating the team of scientists behind the lunar mission. World leaders including President Ranil Wickremesinghe and tech leaders including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (both of whom have private space companies) have wished India on this spectacular achievement. India has now firmly established itself as a space superpower, with several space missions under its belt including one to Mars (Mangalyaan). This story was turned into a hit Bollywood movie starring Akshay Kumar as the lead scientist of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
This space probe has landed at an opportune moment since recent research suggests that the lunar poles might contain trace amounts of water, which will be essential if human settlements are to be built on the Moon. The US indeed has a plan to make this a reality in the next decade through its manned spaceflight program Artemis. Several private companies in the US are also planning cargo missions to the Moon.
But with Chandrayaan-3’s success, India has overshadowed both US and Russia, whose own Luna-25 craft crash landed on the Moon just a couple of days earlier, acutely embarrassing the Russian space agency Roscosmos. Japan also experienced a similar failure when a probe sent by the private company ISpace crash landed on the Moon a few months ago.
Space, which used to be the sole preserve of the big powers, is now literally opening up with the entry of the European Space Agency (ESA), India and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the “final frontier”. UAE astronauts have already served on board the International Space Station (ISS), with Dr. Sultan Al Neyadi becoming the first person who is both Arab and Muslim to complete a spacewalk recently. The UAE space agency also sent a probe to Mars (Emirates Mars Mission) and plans to send another probe to the Asteroid Belt.
As Indian Prime Minister Modi rightly pointed out, space belongs to all of humanity. In any case, it is too big to be tackled by any single country. Hence, collaboration among space agencies should be the way forward. Prime Minister Modi and US President Joe Biden signed the Artemis Accords (for manned missions to the Moon) in June this year and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the ISRO will also cooperate on several future projects. The Government should explore the possibility of getting Sri Lankan scientists to work on these projects.
Behind Chandrayaan’s success was a team of dedicated scientists – out of which around 55 were women. This is a far cry from the days of Apollo 11, when a woman was hardly seen in the control room. This is a lesson for all other countries, that more girls and women should be encouraged to take up STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects from the junior grades. As the success of Chandrayaan-3 shows, the sky is the limit for women who follow STEM subjects.
There are those who question the value of space exploration when there are so many problems to be solved back on Earth. But the more we learn about other worlds, the more we learn about our own. Besides, humankind is inherently wired to explore – if the earliest humans never ventured out in search of the Great Unknown, we would still be confined to Africa. But they did – and now we are going in search of other worlds. There is no doubt that humans will settle down on the Moon and Mars, despite the inhospitable environment. Yes, this will partly be driven by the hunt for valuable metals and minerals, but scientific research will still be a formidable component. We still do not know the proper answer to the question of how life began and the probable discovery of life on Mars or the icy moons of Jupiter will shed light on this perennial question. It will also fundamentally alter our beliefs and views on life itself.
The Earth is being hard-hit by Climate Change and if we continue to abuse the planet at current rates, it will be inhospitable within the next 500 years. By studying other worlds, it will perhaps be possible to draw lessons to save our own.
