Chandrayaan didn’t need the hoopla of a live telecast

India’s Chandrayaan 3 lunar mission has been a subject of great excitement across the world. Social media is rife with discussions around it. I am part of a WhatsApp group called ‘Wolfpack’ that also discussed this formidable feat for hours, both before and after the landing. Contrary to what the high-testosterone name suggests, the group comprises a few friends who were all once geeky misfits. Back in college, we would often gather to challenge each other with quizzes and physics problems, indulge in endless discussions on science fiction, and most importantly nitpick and make fun of the jocks who had girlfriends. Arthur C. Clarke was one of our favourite authors and his work on the short story Sentinel was collectively deemed a path-breaking piece of literature.

Whether we now know it or not, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, inspired by Sentinel, has left an indelible vision of space and spacefaring in everyone’s minds. So scientifically accurate was the depiction of space flight in this 1968 epic, that generations of filmmakers after him continue to use the film as a visual template to depict deep space travel. The resounding success of this movie meant that the aura of space and the look-and-feel of its real experience was a subject of such curiosity that a live broadcast of video signals back to Earth became one of the main mission objectives of America’s Apollo 11 in 1969. The first thing that Neil Armstrong did after stepping on the Moon was set up a Westinghouse TV camera on a tripod and a transmission antenna. Then Buzz Aldrin pressed a switch to start the broadcast of a grainy video feed back to Earth. The famous words of a great leap for mankind, etc, came only after all that set-up. Back on Earth, TV channels covered the historic event with pomp and fanfare. In the UK, the broadcast featured young Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, among others, and was accompanied by music from David Bowie and Pink Floyd’s special creation for the event, Moonhead. Across the Atlantic, CBS pioneered a new special-effects technique to add graphics to the live feed from the Moon. This technique was later christened HAL 10000, a homage to HAL 9000, the sentient computer antagonist in Kubrick’s film.

In comparison, the Chandrayaan 3 lander module’s landing felt a lot more grounded. One Wolfpack member displayed disappointment about Isro’s landing not being broadcast live. In fact, excitement over lunar landings continued to drop after the first one. The five crewed moon landings that followed are barely even in public memory. In 1976, once the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 successfully landed and brought back samples, the Cold War chest thumping around the Moon was over. Scientists and people in general lost interest for the next 32 years. It would be 2008 before Isro’s Chandrayaan 1 became the next to successfully reach a human-made impactor to the lunar surface. There’s a reason that all of the 50-plus landings since Apollo 11 merely managed brief mentions on TV news. In reality, the window view during deep space travel would make for boring television. When we look out of the window of a plane at cruising altitude, nothing seems to move. Now multiply that effect by 10,000. In deep space, a traveller would see even less, and relative motion even slower. Almost all of the videos we see from space are invariably speeded up or touched up before release. The Hubble Telescope’s grand images of Mystic Mountains in the Carina Nebula have been processed so much that they would never appear the same to the naked eye. Thus, a live feed from deep space wouldn’t make exciting television at all. The now released, curated video of the landing and release of the Pragyan rover make for far more exciting viewing than a live feed would have been. This curated video is a much better use of mission resources and will excite curious minds far more.

Back when Vikram Sarabhai recommended the setting up of a space research organization and a committee to create an Indian space programme, the mission objectives were likely very different. Then the world was obsessed with space flight mostly for the delivery of satellites into orbit and payloads (read nuclear bombs) to other ends of the world. We live in different times now. It is established that humans are a spacefaring species. I believe, though, that we won’t use our capabilities for living in space or on other planets. Space is an incredibly hostile place, not designed for the human body or mind. However, the possibilities that open up with collaborative use of space travel for applications like mining, manufacturing, and specialty research will be civilization defining. Companies like Spaceflight Inc and Intuitive Machines are already creating business plans for lunar payload delivery and ride-sharing to the Moon. With Chandrayaan 3, Isro has shown its prowess in robotics, precision-control of flight in rare atmospheric conditions, engineering machinery that works in extreme conditions, and much more. Above all, it has signalled that India is an active player in space industries of the future. That’s worth much more than a live video feed.