what we achieve from chandryan 3 mission
success of governments in landing spacecrafts on the moon indicates that states can be powerful and competent actors
August 23, with Chandrayaan-3’s
lander module making a soft landing on the moon,
India became only the fourth country after the erstwhile भूतपूर्व Soviet Union, the U.S., and China to accomplish this achievement.
Three of these four countries
1 have been late industrialisers; with only one “developed” nation, the U.S., among them.
2 Here interesting questions:
what factors allow for resource-constrained economies to pull off ambitious programmes?
3 What lessons do they hold for our ability to combat challenges?
4 Do such programmes represent a diversion of resources and attention from the pressing needs of development?
Important factors
term of economy , per capita
1 the USSR was 50%-60% the size
of the U.S. economy in the 1960s, when it landed the first spacecraft, Luna 9, on the moon.
2 China’s per capita income
According to World Bank data, when measured in purchasing power parity terms, China’s per capita income was around 22% that of the U.S. in 2013 at the time of its moon landing.
3 India’s per capita income in 2022
was only 10.9% that of the U.S. Clearly, a relative shortfall in resources does not always pose a constraint in achieving ambitious scientific outcomes.
human resources
China, India, and the U.S. are the world’s most populous nations, and have been since the 1970s;
Russia ranked in the top four in the 1970s.
China, Russia, and India laid a lot of importance on science and technology in their post-war/post-colonial development trajectory.
Their current successes are the results of those initial investments
1 China, for instance, filed the most patents in the world in 2019.
2 The large numbers of potential scientists and engineers in these countries provide a clue to the successes of these nations in space exploration despite not being as rich as the developed world.
UAE’s space programme
1 However, the successes of the UAE’s space programme downplay / less important the importance of population.
2 The UAE is richer in per capita terms than the U.S., but with a population of roughly nine million in 2023.
3 UAE launched the Hope probe
In 2020, with the help of Japan, the UAE launched the Hope probe that entered Martian orbit in 2021, making it the fifth country after Russia, the U.S., China, and India to achieve this feat.
4 This is a remarkable achievement considering that the UAE Space Agency was only inaugurated in 2014.
Perhaps the most important factor is the role of the state.
5 In 2022, the head of the Emirates Mars Mission, Omran Sharif, stressed the importance of the “triple helix model”,
- where the government,
- the private sector,
- and academics worked together, and not in silos, to achieve objectives.
whether developing economies, with problems such as poverty, can afford ?
1 whether developing economies, with problems such as poverty, can afford the diversion of valuable resources to such ambitious programmes.
2 One problem with such objections is that it is only directed at developing economies, as though developed nations have no internal problems to speak of / mention .
3 In the documentary Summer of Soul, African-American participants at a music festival in 1969, held at Harlem, New York, expressed their opposition to Neil Armstrong’s historic moon landing.
They said need to
- civic infrastructure and
- racism as issues requiring urgent action,
- and said that the space programme diverted resources and attention.
- Yet the Apollo missions are considered triumphs / विजय का उल्लास on the part of humanity.
4 The question of whether resources directed to space programmes are a diversion from pressing development needs, however, is a valid one.
- The knowledge gain from these missions will contribute to human progress,
- can attract business and revenue from private players
A true partnership
1 What is required is a true partnership between the two, with active intervention of the state in order to provide the space for ingenuity to flourish.
2 The success of governments in landing spacecrafts on the moon indicates that states can be powerful and competent actors.
4 Apollo moon landings - In her book Mission Economy, the economist Mariana Mazzucatto
studies the role of the
- U.S. government and
- NASA in coordinating the activities of
- different actors and
- organisations,
- private and public, in order to achieve the Apollo moon landings.
No doubt, social problems such as climate change and hunger are very different when compared to well-defined objectives such as landing on the moon.
But our successes in space show us the road map for navigating concerns on earth. An inclusive and secular state, committed to building the capacity required to ensure genuine human development, is the need of the hour.
Source the hindu
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