JOIN USThe COWS coming home, and India is not ready
China’s space programme, which took off in a modest manner only in the early 1990s, has entered a haloed zone after the successful landing of its Zhu Rong rover on Mars, followed by the launch of the Large Modular Chinese Space Station (LMCSS) in April this year. On April 29, China launched the world’s third-largest rocket, the Long March-5, carrying the core module of China’s Tiangong space station. The bold China Manned Space logo put the world on notice: China has not just arrived in space but is within striking distance of taking leadership in a new era of space exploration and exploitation.
China began attempts to join the Cold War ‘Space Race’ during the 1970s, but faced several failures, not least because of the state of its economy then and the horrendous demonising of intellectuals and scientists during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving the US as the lone Superpower, and the 1990 Gulf War, which the Chinese military watched in horror, spurred the political leadership to launch a determined programme to build space capabilities for a country that feared that the US could do to it what it had done to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Among the first major tasks cut out for the military was Project 921: to build a Chinese space station in phases – phase 1 was to launch a manned space mission (which it did in 2003) and build capabilities such as spacewalking (demonstrated in 2008); phase 2 was to build China’s own space station. Note that the project was initiated just after the US and Russia joined hands to build the International Space Station (ISS), and the plan was for China’s Tiangong space station to be in place just as the ISS would approach the end of its life in 2025.
With the launch of the Tianhe-1, the core module of the Tiangong space station, China is on path to completing the space station by the end of 2022. To accomplish this, China National Space Administration (CNSA) is going ahead with 11 crew and cargo missions that will build out two space laboratories around the core module, with enough facilities for three people to be on board through the year. In all, China plans to launch 40 missions in the next year as it races to take leadership in space from America. This, when the rest of the world is struggling with the Covid-19 pandemic, China’s gift to the world.
Our own ISRO, in comparison, has seven launches planned (the space agency chief says it is 14 missions, counting each rocket launch and orbiting of a satellite as two missions!) and delayed several other missions citing problems due to the pandemic. There is uncertainty over whether Gaganyaan’s pre-cursor unmanned mission will happen in December this year or not.
The fraught geopolitics of space is clearly coming into view. The Americans are worried that other countries will flock to the Chinese space station, ushering in a China-led space order. Russia, which has said it will end its role in the ISS by 2025 (even if the US extends its life to 2028 or so), and China have announced that they will jointly build an International Lunar Space Station, which too will be available to other countries to use. The US wants allies and friends to sign up to its own Artemis Accord, to preserve and promote a US-led space order. Nearly a dozen national space agencies have signed up (but note the absence of the European Space Agency). Should India sign up to the Artemis Accord?
A new ‘space race’, a Cold War in Space (COWS), is underway. India will once again be called upon to choose sides. There is an argument that joining the Artemis Accord will be a natural extension of India’s role in the Quad with the US, Japan and Australia. But then, what will it do to our relations with Russia, which is increasingly finding itself in the Chinese orbit?
Sooner or later, there will be a movement towards control and denial regimes in space, such as were erected to stop the spread of nuclear and missile capabilities during the Cold War. India must begin preparing for that today. For a start, we must build capabilities to insulate the space programme from eventualities such as the pandemic and step up the op-tempo of our space projects. When China can do it, when SpaceX can do it, why can’t ISRO? The Modi government has opened up space to the private sector. Now, it should aggressively prioritise space activities to boost the economy and national security.