by Gurbir Singh
Figure 13‑7 Satellite-Based Augmentation Systems. Credit ESA
As a result of international collaboration, it is now possible to buy a single handset that can receive and process signals from multiple (BeiDou, Galileo and GLONASS) constellations. Traditionally, a minimum of four satellites from a constellation of about 30 was necessary to get a prompt and accurate position. In the not-too-distant future, there may be 30 satellites overhead at any one time from a constellation of over a 100.
Chapter Fourteen
Human Space Flight
W ithout Gagarin, there would have been no Armstrong, asserted the Russian rocket engineer Boris Chertok (1912–2011).[764] Yuri Gagarin from the USSR was the first man in space in 1961. Eight years later, Neil Armstrong from the US became the first man to walk on the surface of the Moon. Just as the US’s space programme was driven by the success of the USSR’s programme, the success of the Chinese Human Spaceflight (HSF) programme has been the impetus for that of India’s. China space program is operated by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and started in the mid-1950s. The US has barred NASA from cooperating with CNSA but despite that, China has the most advanced space program after the US and Russia.
HSF is a natural aspiration for any national space programme and India is no different but there are suggesting that China’s HSF has been a motivation for India’s. China’s first spaceflight with an astronaut was completed in 2003, and by the following decade, China had flown ten astronauts, including a woman, in four flights.[765] India has not launched any Indian’s to space and does not have an active Human Spaceflight program. ISRO presented plans for its HSF programme to the Prime Minister of India in October 2006 to secure funds and initiate the programme in April 2007. This timeline suggests that this was most likely triggered by China’s success of Shenzhou 5 in 2003 and Shenzhou 6 in 2005. However, a decade after presenting those plans, ISRO still does not have a formal approval from the government to proceed with its HSF programme.
From the outset, ISRO has been clear that its main objective is to use space to address the social and economic needs of the nation. HSF does not naturally fit into this vision. Apart from the enormous cost of HSF, any funds diverted to such a programme would not be available for ISRO’s earth observation and communication capabilities responsible for delivering those social and economic benefits. Besides, the vision of its founder Vikram Sarabhai explicitly excluded manned-spaceflight “There are some who question the relevance of space activities in a developing nation. To us, there is no ambiguity of purpose. We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space-flight. But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.”[766]
Financial and political commitment aside, India lacks one of the key elements for a HSF programme, a heavy-lift launch vehicle. Even if a spacecraft qualified for a human crew and a fully trained human crew were available, India does not have a reliable human-rated launch vehicle to deliver the spacecraft to Earth orbit. However, the development of some critical elements associated with HSF are in progress. For example, a spacecraft re-entry experiment was conducted in 2007, a mock-up of a crew capsule was flown and recovered after a sub-orbital flight in 2014, and work is progressing on astronaut training facilities, space food and launch escape system.
India’s First and Only Astronaut Rakesh Sharma
Of India’s 1.3 billion nationals, only one has had the first-hand experience of spaceflight with direct support of the Indian government. Two astronauts with connections to India, Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams have flown as part of the American space programme. Four Indian astronauts (two from the Indian Air Force and two ISRO) have trained for a specific mission but only one went to space. In April 1984, Wing commander Rakesh Sharma (born 1949) from the IAF spent eight days aboard the Soviet space station Salyut 7 in LEO. India did not solicit the spaceflight but accepted after it was offered a second time by the USSR. The first offer was made by Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982), leader of the USSR, in 1978 to the then Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai (1896–1995). Following a general election in India, Indira Gandhi was elected, and Brezhnev successfully repeated the offer to the new Prime Minister in 1980.[767]
The offer to fly an Indian astronaut onboard the USSR’s space station Salyut 7 was part of the USSR’s wider Interkosmos programme and not an offer exclusively made to India. The Interkosmos programme was a part of the IGY objective to build international cooperation but also a strategy to extend the USSR’s political influence. In addition to India, nationals of 15 other countries, including Hungary, Vietnam, Poland, East Germany, Afghanistan and France, experienced spaceflight between 1978 and 1988 through the Interkosmos programme. The US pursued a similar dual pronged policy. India already had a strong relationship with the USSR going back to the early 1960s when the latter had played a key role in India’s very first rocket launch from Thumb and assisted in the launch of India’s first satellite in the 1970s. It was not just in space technology that India received offers of assistance but in other sectors, too, during the period of the Cold War. Through such offers of collaboration, both the US and the USSR attempted to persuade non-aligned nations, including India, to side with their respective geopolitical world view.
When the offer came from the USSR, ISRO was making progress with its INSAT satellite programme and developing the infrastructure on the ground to support it. Launch vehicle technology was still at an early stage. ISRO had achieved initial success with the SLV-3, but the PSLV was still more than a decade away. HSF did not feature in its plans, and ISRO could not justify investing time and resources to gain the experience of eight days of human spaceflight that had no foreseeable value once the mission was over. So, when the Prime Minister passed on the offer of a free spaceflight for an Indian astronaut, ISRO declined. The Prime Minister then approached the Indian Air Force (IAF). Upon receiving a positive response, she took the political decision in 1980 to proceed. She instructed ISRO to provide full support and, if possible, to design meaningful scientific experiments that could be conducted during the mission.
The search for a suitable candidate then commenced. Reminiscent of the secret plan under which the USSR had selected Yuri Gagarin for his flight in April 1961, a secret programme (named Pawan ‘the wind’ in Hindi) was initiated in India. Around 200 IAF test pilots volunteered for “something extraordinary” under this programme.[768] It was only when the selection process reduced the number of candidates to a handful, and the medical tests started that the true nature of the mission, HSF, was disclosed to the applicants. All candidates were put through a series of medical, physical and psychological test at the Institute of Aviation Medicine (now the Institute of Aerospace Medicine). Four candidates were shortlisted, and they travelled to Moscow for further medical tests. Eventually, Ravish Malhotra (born 1943) and Rakesh Sharma were selected as the final two candidates. Although only one would undertake the spaceflight, both underwent identical training. The decision for Sharma to be part of the primary crew and Malhotra in the backup, was made prior to their arrival at Star City in Russia for training in 1982. Sharma was born in the town of Patiala in Punjab in 1949; two years after the country had gained independence.[769] He had joined IAF in 1970, and with 50 hours of training in a Russian MIG 21 fighter, he was on the front line. By his 23rd birthday, he had completed 21 operational missions in defensive and offensive roles during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.
After the war, he became a test pilot. Prior to being selected for the Interkosmos mission, Sharma and Malhotra had known each other and both trained at the National Defence Academy but their time there did not overlap. Malhotra had left before Sharma arrived. The National Defence Academy is a joint services academy of the Indian Armed Forces, where cad
ets of the three services (army, air force and navy) train together. In the 1970s, both had served at India’s Air Force Test Pilot School within the Aircraft Systems Testing Establishment in Bangalore. In 1974, Malhotra was selected for the USAF Test Pilots Course. He attended the class 74A at Edwards Air Force Base and graduated as an Experimental Test Pilot.[770]
Figure 14‑1 Soviet-Indian prime and backup crew from left- Yuri Malyshev, Ravish Malhotra, Rakesh Sharma, Georgi Grechko, Anatoly Berezov and Gennady Strekalov. Credit Sputnik
Following their selection and medical assessments, Sharma and Malhotra arrived in Moscow with their families on 20 September 1982 to begin their training. They were eventually rostered as Research Cosmonauts, Sharma as part of the primary crew and Malhotra in the backup.[771] The primary crew (Commander: Yury Vasilyevich Malyshev (1941–1999), Flight Engineer: Nikolai Nikolayevich Rukavishnikov (1932–2002 – later Rukavishnikov was replaced by Gennady Mikhailovich Strekalov (1940-2004)) and Research Cosmonaut: Rakesh Sharma) and the backup crew (Commander: Anatoli Nikolayevich Berezovoy (1942–2014), Flight Engineer: Georgi Mikhaylovich Grechko (1931–2017) and Research Cosmonaut: Ravish Malhotra) underwent identical training. Should an illness, injury or any other issue prevent any one of the primary crew from flying, the backup crew would step in.
Figure 14‑2 Soyuz Capsule Abort System that Helped Gennady Strekalov Survive a Launch Failure Six Months before His Flight with Sharma. Credit NASA[772]
The 18-month training included assessments, training in a centrifuge and weightless environment, simulations for launch and landing in the Soyuz launch vehicle and survival training to cater for the eventuality that during return the capsule may land in a remote location resulting in a delay between landing and recovery.[773] Since this was a Russian programme, learning the Russian language was a key requirement. Malhotra had some experience with the Russian language. While at the National Defence Academy, he had selected Russian as his foreign language, but it was entirely new for Sharma, who found it to be the “most difficult part of the training.”[774]
On 26 September 1983, six months before their flight on Soyuz T-11, the primary and backup crews, including Sharma and Malhotra, watched the launch of Soyuz T-10-1. With a two-member crew, T-10-1 was to fly to Salyut 7 with a mission to augment its solar arrays. The launch did not go to plan. A fuel leak and fire resulted in the destruction of the launch vehicle and launch pad. The Capsule Abort System engaged removing the crew capsule from the top of the rocket a few seconds before a massive explosion engulfed the launch site. As an experienced fighter and test pilot, Sharma was familiar with such life-and-death situations. He did not tell his wife about the launch failure “as had been my practice right through my flying and testing career.”[775] Gennady Strekalov, one of the two who survived that day, returned to the launch pad six months after his death-defying experience and sat alongside Sharma and Malyshev for another attempt to launch to Salyut 7 when Nikolai Nikolayevich Rukavishnikov (1932–2002) assigned as the flight engineer on Sharma’s flight fell ill.
On Tuesday, 3 April 1984, at 10:38, Rakesh Sharma with Commander Yuri Malyshev and Gennady Strekalov blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard the Soyuz T-11 spacecraft. Ten minutes later, Soyuz T-11 was in a 224 kilometre LEO. There was no repeat of the dramatic events of six months earlier. Sharma, a career pilot, used to looking out of a window when flying, found the absence of windows at launch unnerving. The navigation, cabin pressurisation and warning system displays were placed in front of the research cosmonaut’s seat and it was his duty to monitor the health of these systems during flight. As the only one of the crew without previous spaceflight experience, his role during launch was to monitor instruments and participate only if an emergency arose. None did. Twenty-five hours after launch, Soyuz-T-11 gradually caught up and docked with Salut 7, which had the crew of Salyut T-10 on-board since February. For the next eight days, the six cosmonauts lived and worked together onboard Soyuz-7.[776]
Sharma adapted quickly to microgravity without any ill effects. A day after arrival, he spoke to the Indian Prime Minister from orbit. Reminiscent of President Nixon’s (Richard Milhous Nixon, 1913–1994) speaking to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during their historic Moonwalk in July 1969, this was the political highlight of Sharma’s mission. The brief conversation in Hindi with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi has come to define Sharma’s spaceflight. She asked him “Upur se Bharat kaise dikhta hae (how does India look from above)?” He replied “Saare jahan se acha (best in the world)”. His natural, spontaneous and unrehearsed response were words from the lyrics of a song he was very familiar with since his student days.[777]
Sharma’s mission made a substantial contribution to a sophisticated science experiment called Terra. During April, the huge Indian land mass is clear and cloud free, unlike Europe and the northern latitudes. The Terra Experiment was the collective name for the study of India’s natural resources using data from a variety of sources, including photographic surveys of Indian territory with a multi-zonal MKF-6M apparatus and KATE-140 camera onboard Salyut 7. The images produced formed part of a larger collection, including visual observations and photographic surveys using hand-held cameras, aerial surveys and surface measurements of experimental sections of Indian territory by Indian specialists.[778] The original plan involved Sharma taking images from orbit during the nine passes over India, which was increased to 11 in support of Terra. Around 2,000 images were taken from space during the mission and later added to ISRO’s remote sensing database. The database had been initiated almost a year earlier at the launch of India’s second remote sensing satellite INSAT-1B.
During the eight days in space, Sharma recorded biomedical data from his own body with equipment designed and built by ISRO scientists. He conducted experiments on the phenomenon of undercooling and microgravity and its effects on semiconductor alloys using silver and germanium. Sharma’s yoga experiment was the “most curious of the medical experiments.”[779] It was designed to study the potential of yoga techniques to mitigate the harmful effects of weightlessness on the human body; bones and muscles tend to deteriorate in extended periods of microgravity. Collectively, the crew conducted 43 experiments over the eight days of the mission.
Sharma went to space aboard Soyuz T-11 on 3 April as the 138th person to enter space and returned to Earth aboard Soyuz T-10 on 11 April, landing as planned in the USSR 46 km to the east of the city of Arkalyk. The return to Earth, potentially as hazardous as the launch, was also incident free, although Sharma recalls that the sound of the parachute cables chafing against the brackets was very unnerving “I was certain that the parachute was going to part company.”[780] After his successful flight, he was awarded two medals by the USSR, Hero of the Soviet Union and The Order of Lenin. This was an integral part of the Interkosmos programme, a package deal that all foreign cosmonauts received. Sharma is the only Indian recipient of these awards and with the demise of the USSR on 26 December 1991, will remain so. From the Indian government, he received the Ashok Chakra, and in the interest of diplomatic consistency, the two Russian crew were also awarded the Ashok Chakra.
Figure 14‑3 Crew of Soyuz T-11 in Star City. (Right to left) Gennady Strekalov, Yuri Malyshev, Rakesh Sharma, Ravish Malhotra and Sharma’s wife, Madhu. 15 April 1984. Credit Sputnik
Speaking to the media about his experience, Sharma endorsed passionately the role of international collaboration. Not the collaboration of Interkosmos, which was driven by narrow political objectives of the Cold War, but one borne out of a grander recognition that future space exploration should be conducted by people from planet Earth and not just by representatives of a few of its nations.
He advocates the idea that not every nation should have to reinvent the wheel, nor should they have to develop from scratch their HSF programme. It would not only prevent plundering the meagre resources of planet Earth but also not undermine the collective enterprise that human space exploration ought to be. Sharma is not keen on being defi
ned by his spaceflight, nor is he preoccupied with it but is bemused that others are “It was just an event. It was given to me. I did it, and I want to move on”. It was no “cakewalk” he insists, but it was not as fulfilling as it would have been had he been a career astronaut’.[781]
As a backup pilot, Ravish Malhotra was never called up. Following the joint celebratory tours around India, he returned to his career as a test pilot. Malhotra declined an offer to return to the USSR as an air attaché and turned instead to the private sector and worked for an aerospace company. Since his return in 1984, he has never been back to Russia. Following his spaceflight, Sharma returned to the IAF as a Flight Commander with an operational squadron before joining Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. as chief test pilot. Later he headed the aerospace and defence division of an American Software Company in India.[782]
Figure 14‑4 Rakesh Sharma with Hero of the Soviet Union and The Order of Lenin Awarded by the USSR. August 2013. Credit Author
From ISRO’s perspective, the flurry of media interest upon Sharma’s return to India was followed by nothing; just as ISRO had anticipated. Even though the eight-day-long spaceflight was a great morale boost for the nation, Sharma’s flight, in the absence of a coherent Indian plan for HSF, has remained one of the “isolated artefacts of curiosity.”[783] However, even before Sharma had completed his mission, a demand arose again for another Indian astronaut. This time, it was not from the USSR, but the US.