Space has an odour. Visitors to the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, US, can smell it by pressing a button to inhale a puff of air that smells of space. Space is airless by definition, but the workaround is essential because we can’t inhale ‘space’ without fatal consequences. Despite this logical complication, the experience is evocative and surprising. Space smells of long-distance travel. It smells of Indian highways far from big cities. It smells like the world did long ago on the railways, when almost everyone travelled without air conditioning.
But hereafter, space could smell a little different. From the beginning of the space race, it has smelled of Cold War rivalry, military-industrial complexes and technology-based diplomacy. These metallic notes will remain; but from here on, space will also smell overwhelmingly of commerce, of paper money. Gold is economically and chemically stable. It has no smell, unlike space.
The countdown of the Axiom-4 mission to the International Space station has been aborted twice but soon, astronauts from India, Poland and Hungary could be back in space after 40 years and more. In anticipation, their national media have already declared it to be a turning point for their domestic space programmes. But the composition of the Axiom-4 mission also indicates that the whole world has passed a turning point.
The crew led by American Peggy Whitson will be taken to orbit on Elon Musk’s commercial Dragon launch vehicle, and the project is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, ISRO and the Houston firm Axiom Space, whose most ambitious project is the first commercial space station. The purpose of the collaboration is to facilitate a range of commercial activities in space, from scientific research to space tourism. Space is about to be opened up commercially, just like the world was opened like an oyster by the European Age of Exploration.
About 40 years ago, when India, Poland and Hungary last sent their citizens into space, it was a domain where national governments showed off their technological prowess to compete for geopolitical gains. These three countries made a place for themselves in space under the aegis of Interkosmos, a Russian state programme launched in 1967 to help satellite nations of the USSR and other socialist nations like Afghanistan and Cuba reach space. Non-aligned nations Syria and India were also under its umbrella.
The India chapter of the story began in December 1980, when Soviet head of state Leonid Brezhnev visited New Delhi on a trip designed to confuse the human race. Brezhnev sold a daring global Persian Gulf peace and security pact to a joint session of parliament. He promised to honour national sovereignty, but did not mention the Russian occupation of Afghanistan the year before. Also without naming Afghanistan, President Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy said that attacks on sovereignty in the region would violate Pandit Nehru’s Panchsheel and were unacceptable.
No one really understood what was going on, except that Brezhnev proposed a joint space mission under Interkosmos to Indira Gandhi, that Jagmohan gifted Brezhnev what appears on archival footage to be a shining sculpture of a rocket but is reported to be a lamp, and that four years later, in 1984, Rakesh Sharma got a berth on the Soyuz T-11 mission bound for the Salyut 7 space station.
Of the nations sending citizens to space again on the Axios-4 mission, India was last to the Interkosmos party. But never mind the Soviet bloc chaps, Sharma’s mission beat the UK and Japan by over a decade. The journalist Toyohiro Akiyama was the first Japanese in space under Interkosmos. In 1990, he took the Soyuz TM-11 mission to the Mir Space Station and broadcast live to Japan. The next year, the chemist Helen Sharman became the first person from the UK to lift off and fly to Mir. She had responded to a radio spot: “Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary.”
Interkosmos was a political project with a global footprint, running from Cuba to Mongolia. The USSR beat the US in the first, rapid-fire round of the war of perceptions. Sputnik was the first satellite, visible to the naked eye from Earth and piercingly audible on home radio sets. Audio-visually, it told the world that Russia had arrived. Then, they launched into space the first animal, the dog Laika, the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, and the first woman spacefarer, Valentina Tereshkova.
The US took the advantage with William Anders’ iconic pictures of earthrise, shot as Apollo 8 orbited the moon. And after the “giant leap for mankind” of Apollo 11, the race was over. The USSR was trailing, but it had a unique proposition for the socialist countries―it took them into space. The effect was such that most of them did not invest in space until much later. Unlike India, Poland and Hungary have fledgling space programmes which are still not widely known.
The Axios-4 mission seems to transfer the mantle of patronage of less capable nations from Russia to the US. It’s important for Washington at a time when its soft power is waning. But actually, the mantle has been transferred to private American enterprise, not the government of the United States.
Read all columns by Pratik Kanjilal
Speakeasy Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, The Fletcher School, Tufts University