Interstellar.News: A New Indian 'Space Culture' Portal

In the Sixties of the twentieth century a famous picture created a transformation of consciousness.

In the thick of the Cold War that would have well led humanity into the danger of a nuclear winter, that picture provided a perspective of unity at a planetary scale.

The photograph was taken by astronaut William Anders on 24 December, 1968.

He was in the lunar orbit as part of the Apollo 8 mission.

The picture showing the earth rising above the lunar horizon, provided the vision of earth as one planet. Called 'Earthrise', the photo became the symbol of the environment movement.

The age of space culture has since arrived – more as part of every day life than as merely part of science fiction community and academic citadels.

Evolution has propelled this particular branch of primates from African savanna into Alpha Centauri, Andromeda galaxy and more. Understanding this fact is essential for all sections of humanity to benefit from this incomprehensible vastness that is before us – probably bubbling with opportunities unimaginable.

Evolution has made us potential space apes but we are hopelessly divided as terrestrial apes.

We compete for scarce resources on earth and to maximize in-group resource control we have evolved nations, civilisations and religions, races, languages and ethnicities, ideologies and theologies. With claims of civilisational, racial, ideological, theological superiority, also come claims of superior access to resources.

Here is the problem. These divisions we have evolved for primacy in terrestrial resource consumption hamper our realisation of full potential access to vaster resources that await our species in the space.

We are facing a deeper paradox as well.

Space technology became the symbol of the ideological superiority and technological chest thumping between the two superpowers during the Cold War.

The Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite. Soviet cosmonauts travelled into space. And all these were taunted as the victory of Communist system. Communist man was the new man, space man and the future man.

And Soviet women too. This was a grand ideological declaration.

The United States took up the challenge and the race to moon started.

On 20 July, 1969 the United States astronauts landed on the moon.

The moon landing too was a declaration of victory. The bourgeois/democratic US system could beat the socialist/authoritarian system of the USSR as the future of humanity in space.

But then the interest began to wane.

Today, the budget allocation for NASA is low. When space became a political statement for terrestrial politics, its real significance got lost upon policy makers once the political space race was won.

But beyond the Cold War and propaganda politics there are positive lessons to be learned here.

If one goes through the way the United States and the USSR promoted interest in space science in their general populations, through school curriculum, popular science books, science fiction movies, novels and shows like Star Trek, even comic strips like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, then one will understand how the space technological development has umbilical connection to general public culture.

One of the great triumphs of international Space culture came during the height of the Cold War.

Alexi Leonov (1934-2019), who was the first human to conduct a spacewalk, was also an accomplished artist.

He participated in the very first joint Soviet-US space mission: the famous Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975.

Later he wrote a lavishly illustrated (by himself) children's book on this mission.

This was distributed through the Soviet outlets worldwide and translated into as many languages as possible. The book should be considered a classic in propagating space culture for all humanity beyond propaganda.

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed because of the unsustainably authoritarian nature of the Communist State. In the United States, Gulf wars to Afghan wars to identity politics, from Wokism to Trump, slowly took over the US in the post-Cold War era.

With such a decline in the quality of popular culture, the budget for NASA too decreased.

Today China is taking up the space mission for humanity. But it is under an authoritarian State with huge resource hunger.

Tossing aside every international rule for human safety – of its own citizens- China has monstrously leapt forward in space explorations.

An oligarchy rules China and it can employ resources for space exploration as it sees fit. And for its affluent sections, space has become part of popular culture.

China has grown plants in the dark side of the moon for the first time. It has space stations. It has ambitious space programmes for where none others have gone before. It concentrates on lunar resources and it has built one of the largest radio telescopes to scan the space for possible signals of alien life.

Nothing symbolizes this slow-shifting process so well as the collapse of Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2020 and China unveiling the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), named Tianyan (the Eye of Heaven), the world’s largest single-dish telescope. China provides 10 percent observation time to international scientists.

China is increasingly taking over as the presence and voice of humanity in space. Though the US is far ahead, China is fast filling the gap.

Its science fiction too has come of age and the country is catching up in an accelerated and in a holistic way in developing a space culture.

What we as Indians have to understand is that, this dominance of China in space will have disastrous geopolitical consequences for India.

On 19 April 1975, India launched her first satellite Aryabhata.

Built by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), it was launched by Kosmos-3M, a Soviet launch vehicle from a Soviet site.

Then on 3rd April 1984, Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian to go to space aboard Soyuz T-11.

Both these events happened during the regime of Indira Gandhi. She used it for both domestic boosting of her image and also to announce the world the proximity of India to Soviet Union, particularly in the technological domains.

Vajpayee for the first time worked to make space technology a profitable international business ensuring money flow. Dr. Joshi envisioned Chandrayan. Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced it from the portals of red fort.

While the great space technocrat-scientists Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan shaped ISRO as an eminent space research institution, fine tuning it for a developing nation like India, it was Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam who had moved to DRDO from ISRO who captured the public imagination as rocket and missile man.

His books on using technology and science to alleviate poverty and achieve holistic development became inspiriting national and popular science-for-society literature.

India also achieved its Mars orbital mission - Mangalyaan and became the first nation in space history to reach Mars orbit in a single attempt.

Today, the Narendra Modi government attempts to make every ISRO launch attract people’s interest.

The Atal Tinkering labs take hands-on-science to schools.

The movie Rocketry brought to the general audience the heroic, behind-the-curtain toils Indian space scientists are making in an unipolar world with covet operations galore to thwart the Indian space programme.

We are a democracy. We have been colonised with massive resource drainage for at least two centuries. We are hopelessly divided and worse, allow extra-territorial powers to sabotage our own progress though agitational politics against all developments.

A case in point where agitational politics and science illiteracy came together was the movement to stop the neutrino observatory project in Tamil Nadu.

Meanwhile, India as an Asian and pagan democracy is facing a techno-war imposed on it by a ruthless oligarchic super power.

Competing in space technology needs a multi-pronged approach.

The nation has to cultivate space culture. The space has to be a domain free of politics and we need to feel a sense of unity.

Space culture is at its heart both science and culture. While we have that island of excellence called ISRO, space culture has not percolated into the society; its importance is not reflected in the textbooks, it is not seen in our schools.

When is the last time you saw a model of ISRO launch vehicle in the office of the principal of a government school?

Today, thanks to internet, slowly the ISRO launches are watched by increasing number of populations but still the spread of interest is too slow and too small.

More importantly, we see only technological achievements and deeper space questions are still not part of our people’s culture.

Consider some questions.

• Can there be life – microbial most probably- on some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter?

How much has our science curriculum made our youth - teenagers and early adults- get interested in such questions?

How much has our media worked to make our general population get interested in such questions?

In India, successive governments cutting across political spectrum have tried to impress the voters and world with achievements in space technology.

Unfortunately, the Marxist stranglehold on education has made a political propaganda slogan out of ‘scientific temper’. It became a Nehruvian-Marxist crusade against the ‘unscientific Hindoo’ culture of India. This has led to general alienation of Indian society from the spirit of scientific culture.

But we need a renaissance of space culture even more intensely.

It is towards this end that a new portal was launched on March 27, 2023 – the Interstellar.news.

Two innovating and inspiring minds have joined together in this venture.

Defence Journalist, Advisor and Digital Media Entrepreneur Nitin A. Gokhale along with Prof. Chaitanya Giri launched the digital news platform - Interstellar.

Dr. Chaitanya Giri has been with the astro-biology research and has participated in the famous Rosetta mission - wherein a robotic probe was launched on a comet by European Space Agency (ESA).

He is also a domain expert on space-tech and energy-tech policy studies. Thus we have a complimentary and dynamic combination of technological pragmatism and quest of pure science.

A look into their social media, Twitter handle tweets and one finds an enriched quality tweets of scientific information that has international quality and covers varied space topics.

Here is a sample:

A tweet on the 48th flight completion of Mars helicopter as part of Mars ingenuity probe:

How a massive corona hole opening up in the sun may increase the intensity of Aurora display on earth:

Rolls-Royce developing a miniature nuclear reactor for lunar base:

Here is an in-depth discussion by two experts on the evolving role of Indian Space industry:

When asked, Dr. Giri stated that the aim of the portal is not just presenting science and technology articles but developing a space culture for India.

From space economics to orbital ecology with satellite debris, from search for extra terrestrial life to developing an lunar geo-economic corridor, the space portal aims to cover all things space and through that it wants people of all walks of life to get enthralled by space and contribute to what is the future of humanity.

India being an ancient civilisation, a modern young nation-state and a democratic society that predicates itself on preserving diversity, has to contribute to space.

When it comes to speaking for humanity in space, if only Western and Maoist civilisations represent humanity, then that would be a distorted picture.

In a way India is the space where all humanity has found a place and it is only right that India is duty bound to have its presence and voice in space.

Interstellar.news is a very important step towards that end.

So, we wish in the future this day will be remembered as one of the significant mile stone in both the space history and cultural history of India.