[India will launch an unmanned rover into
space on Monday. If successful, India will join a select group of nations
capable of reaching the moon.]
By
Jeffrey Gettleman
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Students launched a model
water-propelled rocket during a lesson by the Space
India education company
at Sri Venkateshwar International School in
Dwarka, New Delhi. Credit
Jeffrey Gettleman
|
NEW
DELHI — It’s 10 a.m. on a
muggy Delhi day, and it’s time for space class.
Like so many other middle schoolers, Veronica
Sodhi, a 12-year-old with big dreams, says space class is her favorite subject,
but on Friday there was something even more special.
India is all set to send a robotic rover to
rumble around the south pole of the moon, a huge leap forward for its space
program. The rocket launches at 2:51 a.m. Monday and the anticipation is
stoking national pride.
Indian children are sending good luck YouTube
messages to the national space agency; V.I.P.’s are converging on the launch
site in a remote coastal area near Chennai; the little six-wheeled rover is
crawling across the front pages of all the newspapers; and telecasters are
tapping the patriotism with special broadcasts on “India’s Greatest Space
Adventure.”
At the K.R. Mangalam World School near New
Delhi, a place for the children of the upper middle class — there’s a roller
rink on the ground floor — Veronica and her classmates were pumped.
“Children,” asked Harjeet Kaur, the space
class teacher, “why did we name this mission ‘Chandrayaan’?”
Veronica shot up from her desk so fast she
nearly knocked over the chair behind her.
“Because-it-means-moon-and-vehicle,” she said
in one breath.
“Everybody clap for her,” the teacher said.
“Is there another country that has sent a mission to the moon’s south pole?”
“No!” the students shouted back.
“We are all proud Indians, right, students?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Really? I can’t hear you.”
“YES, MA’AM!”
“It would be really cool to walk on the
moon,” Veronica whispered a little while later. “I mean, kind of like hiking
but really cool.”
A moon mission is a bold move for any
country, but especially for one that has hundreds of millions of people still
stuck in poverty.
But this is the puzzle of India. It is also a
hotbed of modernity, a fount of scientific and engineering prowess. Its
software developers are known as some of the world’s greatest, and each year
its universities pump out thousands of highly talented scientists and engineers,
experts in the most cutting-edge technologies.
Space suits it.
A big reason Prime Minister Narendra Modi,
who won a thumping re-election in May, is so popular is that he has been
pushing a brawnier, more assertive India, hungry to claim its place as a
superpower.
Just weeks before the election began— and
commentators found the timing a little suspicious — Mr. Modi announced that
India had just shot down a satellite whizzing 17,000 miles per hour 150 miles
above Earth. Few countries can do that.
This isn’t even India’s first moon mission.
In 2008, the lunar probe Chandrayaan I didn’t land, but discovered water
molecules on the moon.
The moon is definitely enjoying a bit of a
renaissance on Earth. China is working on its own mission to the moon’s south
pole. Scientists believe there might be a lot of water ice down there as well
as Helium-3, a future energy source thought to be abundant on our little
neighbor.
Many Indians feel this mission, which will
unfold more than 200,000 miles away, is a turning point in their country’s
history. They use almost the exact same words to describe Chandrayaan’s
importance: “We will now be the fourth space power!” They follow after the
United States, Russia and China.
“India would like their little space in
space,” said Sunita Nagpal, the principal of the K.R. Mangalam school.
To help raise the next generation of
astronauts, and go beyond the standard government science curriculum (which one
private school principal snobbily dismissed as written for a rickshaw puller’s
son), many private schools have looked for new ways to teach space.
Enter Space India. Formed in 2001, it is a
for-profit education company that runs workshops, field trips and regular
classes on astronomy, rocketry and space exploration, in both public schools
and fancy private ones.
Many schools do not have their own space
teachers and hire instructors from Space India, which even runs overnight space
camp at several locations far from any cities.
This week, its lessons revolved around the
moon and the Chandrayaan-2 mission.
The entire mission costs less than $150
million. The orbiter will conserve fuel by making ever-widening orbits around
the Earth before being captured by the moon’s gravity and pulled into lunar
orbit.
This takes much longer than the straight shot
made by the Apollo missions, which cost billions (the fact that humans were
along for the ride wasn’t cheap either). Chandrayaan’s rover won’t be rumbling
across the moon’s surface until September.
It’s hard to overlook the synergy with the
50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission this month.
“But this is just a coincidence,” said Vivek
Singh, a spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization, India’s version
of NASA. “We were late.”
The Indians wanted to launch two or three years
ago, with a Russian rover, but when the Russians backed out they decided to
build their own, which took some time.
The hardest part, everyone agrees, will be
the soft landing. The plan is for a landing craft to lower itself from the
orbiter and gently plop itself down on the powdery moon surface. Then the
little six-wheel rover (which weighs about 60 pounds) will pop out.
When the Israelis tried to pull off a similar
moon mission in April, it didn’t go so well. Communications sizzled out,
leaving people gathered outside the control room with tears in their eyes. The
lander had crashed.
To appreciate these difficulties, the
students in space class at K.R. Mangalam school were asked to make lunar
landers out of Styrofoam bowls, with folded paper taped to the side to act as a
shock absorber. The trick was to drop the bowls from their desks and have them
land without the astronaut — a pen cap — falling out.
At space class at another Delhi-area school,
students built rockets out of plastic soda bottles. The style of teaching was
the same, a very cheerful Socratic method, with another Space India instructor,
Heena Bhatia, standing in front of the class shouting out questions and waiting
for a rapid delivery of facts.
“You know the basic parts of the rocket? Who
will tell me?”
One boy stood up and blurted out the answers
like verbal bullets.
“Nose cone. Body. Fins.”
“Everyone clap for Akshay,’’ the teacher
beamed. “Now do you want to make your own rockets?”
“Yes!” the class screamed.
“Sir will be giving you materials to make
your own rocket,” the teacher said, gesturing to a man with tattooed forearms
deep in concentration in taping together little fins — he was a Space India
assistant.
All children dream of the stars. But in New
Delhi, it’s often hard to see any.
That’s because the air pollution is so bad
and the city lights are so bright. The result is a smudgy, opaque night sky.
“But up on the moon, it will be so
beautiful,” Veronica said, her eyes glowing with that special 12-year-old
light. “It will be so dark and quiet. There will be so many stars.”
“I don’t know why I’ve always had this
interest in the moon,” she said. “But I do. I want to be close to it, not on
YouTube, not on the internet. I’ve always dreamed of being an astronaut. I want
to make my India proud of me.”
