BENGALURU: Students from various parts of the country were exposed to life in space, in interaction with astronauts, at the three-day symposium on human space flight and exploration in the city on Thursday. During the session, Indian astronaut Air Commodore (retd) Ravish Malhotra, responding to a student’s question, said, “You never know till the end who will finally fly. So far as you’re concerned you’re on the team. Yes, it is a little bit of a disappointment. But its like the toss of a coin that one of the two teams has to go,” he said.
However, he rued that the government took decades to come up with its indigenous human space flight programme. “Had the government decided earlier I would have been on the team. It’s unfortunate we decided 35 years late,” he said. American astronaut Colonel Benjamin Alvin Drew, NASA liaison to the Department of Space, said that the detection of carbon dioxide concentration was still in the primitive stage in all space stations. Real-time detection could be ensured with multispectral cameras that are used on Earth.
From his hundreds of hours in space, he said that some common health conditions were kidney infections, eye infections and slow healing wounds to the extent that one has to tape them up. “Even so there is a huge pharmacy up there,” he said joking about the number of medicines that astronauts are expected to carry with them.
In an earlier session, astronauts from various space agencies agreed when General J F Clervov, an astronaut from France, said that it was the taste for adventure that drives one to be an astronaut. Thomas Reiter from the European Space Agency said that all space missions were in a way contributing to the idea of a lunar village. Dr Oleg Kotov, IBMP, Russia, added that research was being conducted on plants in space, keeping longer missions in mind.
Hazza Al Mansouri, the first astronaut from UAE, who went to space in September 2019, sent a picture of his country from space. Astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi said that it was an emotional moment for the country.