The honest chat with ISRO chief on India's moon missions

Brut India

As India gears up for the launch of Chandrayaan 3, here's a throwback to 2021 when the determined ISRO chief, S Somnath, spoke about the prospect of a soft landing on the moon.

Transcript

00:00Let me be a little rude and say, but could our frugal approach have partly explained

00:07the well-publicized failure of the Chandrayaan moon landing?

00:10I think it has nothing to do with the approaches of engineering.

00:13We may fail. Again, there is no guarantee of success in any rocket mission.

00:18Why is it worth doing?

00:19Rockets are the only means by which human beings can ever travel the shores of the earth to another planet.

00:30Let me be a little rude and say, but could our

00:59frugal approach have partly explained the well-publicized failure of the Chandrayaan

01:05moon landing and the way in which the land rover crashed?

01:08Absolutely not. I think it has nothing to do with the approaches of engineering.

01:13Approaches of engineering is one and problems and issues in a mission are another.

01:19See, we must realize that space technology is a very unpardoning technology.

01:23Just the case of an aircraft which you are designing, assume that I am designing a

01:27transport aircraft before it actually flies with passengers.

01:29It would have gone through hundreds of tests in the ground.

01:32For a mission to Chandrayaan or Mars, we will never ever get a chance to launch it in a

01:37test flight and then say the landing is perfect.

01:40For in the case of Chandrayaan 2, we did actually simulated lot of landing exercise in earth.

01:46But they were all successful.

01:48But the moment that we go to moon, there is yet another problem that we have a low gravity

01:52compared to earth. You cannot create a low gravity field in earth.

01:55Are we going to try again?

01:56We are going to try again because we understood there are parameters beyond what we actually

02:01done the simulation in ground.

02:03We need to go further.

02:04For that, we are making a lot of simulation testbeds.

02:07We are also making sensors, basically looking at where you are, more redundant systems,

02:13new technologies which we have not put last time.

02:15All this will come into the new lander and with the knowledge and confidence, we have

02:19to go ahead.

02:20We may fail again.

02:22I want to tell you that there is no guarantee of success in any rocket mission.

02:26But why is it worth doing?

02:28Why is it worth doing?

02:28Because it is worth doing this, we are doing it.

02:31See, we must realize that the high-tech engineering activities of this nature, why human beings

02:37do?

02:38It is because it is challenging and it is also because it is the only way that human

02:43beings can explore.

02:44I tell my young engineers, why we do you work on rockets?

02:47Not because that it puts some satellite up there.

02:49Rockets are the only means by which human beings can ever travel the shores of the earth

02:53to another planet.

02:55There is no other way.

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