Careers 124 - The people behind Chandrayaan - Lessons from their careers

It was a remarkable day for India, the first country to land a spacecraft successfully on the moon's South Pole. Only in India would you see around 9 million people watching the live stream of a spacecraft landing. Since the South Pole has valuable reserves of ice and Helium-3, every country targeted the region for future human-led moon exploration. Every effort in this region has failed till today. The US, which landed many men on the moon, has been unable to do a soft landing of even a machine on the moon since 1975. Despite tremendous technological advances since 1990, only China has shown the capacity to soft-land devices on the moon. Let us not talk about landing humans; everyone is busy rediscovering how to land machines on the moon. Outside China, no other country has come close to a soft landing on the moon till India did the unexpected today.?This pictorial ?represents all the landings on the moon and successes by country.?

To people who criticize the budget allocation, India's spending is minuscule. Secondly, the offshoots of these types of research are tremendous. Defense funding for an arcane ARPANET project enabled the US to create the foundations of the internet and define the online space that emerged. No wonder that almost all big tech companies are based out of the US and adding trillions of dollars to their economy. Similarly, space could be the next big frontier in ways nobody can predict. Game-changing innovation is important for poor countries to lift themselves out of poverty dramatically. That is why the space battle cannot be lost. The fruits of such research are already being used in GPS positioning, 6G networks, and innumerable other future technologies.

With a yearly budget of 23 billion dollars, NASA has yet to achieve what ISRO did with a budget of 2 billion dollars. The entire Chandrayaan 3 budget was 75 million dollars, much less than the budget of the movie "Interstellar," which cost 165 million dollars. NASA has been outsourcing much of its work to SpaceX because of its lack of progress. Just nine years back, the New York Times lampooned India's space ambitions in a cartoon by picturizing a farmer and a buffalo knocking at the doors of an elite space club.

Much credit goes to the scientists who made this possible at ISRO and institutions supporting ISRO, like NASA. The people running the show at ISRO have interesting backgrounds.?

1. The Chairman of ISRO, Somanath, is an undergrad from Thangal Kunju Musaliar College of Engineering in Kerala and has a master's degree from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). He has been in ISRO since 1985.?
2. The Chandrayaan 3 Project Director, Veeramuthuvel , has a?diploma from a private polytechnic . He later completed his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Sairam Engineering College, Chennai, and a Master's degree from NIT Trichy. He worked in Lakshmi Machine Works, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, and later finished his Ph.D. from IIT Madras in 2016. He joined ISRO in 2004.
3. The Mission Director, Mohanakumar, is an IIT Madras undergrad and a Ph.D. from IISc.?
4. The Associate Mission Director, Narayanan, has undergrad and Master's degrees from the College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram. He joined ISRO in 1983.
5. Deputy Project Director Kalpana has a bachelor's degree from IIT Kharagpur.
6. The Director of UR Rao Satellite Centre, Sankaran, has a Master's degree from Bharatidasan University in 1986.?
7. The Director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Unnikrishnan Nair, has a bachelor's degree from Mar Athanasius College of Engineering in Kerala, a Master's degree from IISc and a Ph.D. from IIT Madras.?

One of the reasons that ISRO has been able to beat NASA in its own game is the depth of technical manpower in India. Even students from plain vanilla engineering colleges in India are second to none regarding raw engineering prowess. The IITs and IISc have emerged as excellent training schools to groom talent in domains that are very important for India's strategic interests. Most of the ISRO scientists are from the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. There has always been an interesting fascination with space exploration and aerospace engineering in these states, and this interest has only increased with the legends and exploits of stalwarts like Abdul Kalam. It is also worth noting that each ISRO leader has spent up to three decades in industrial research to master space technology. Nothing happens instantly, and any success in highly competitive domains results from sustained effort over many decades. This maxim is true for any branch of technological advancement. Genius and luck can only play out if there is enormous hard work to back it up.?

A big takeaway for readers of this column is that not everything in life is quantified by how much money one can generate in a lifetime. Everyone values different things at different times in their career. The ISRO scientists joined the institution in the 1980s when the opportunities in India were minimal. Because of the government's misguided economic policies, the country even ended up in a balance of payments crisis in the early 1990s. Most students of that era ended up emigrating abroad in droves. Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, and Arvind Krishna are examples of top students from India of that time who didn't see economic opportunities in their home country but ended up heading the biggest tech companies in the world. The ISRO scientists in India duked it out in India, toiling away in obscurity and building technology from scratch. They gained respect in their communities and are hero-worshipped in India. These people have done much more for the future of 1.4 billion people in India than the achievements of any big tech CEO. Some desires and motivations don't always translate to dollars. These are the actors who shape the destiny of a country.

The same questions haunt the students of today as they graduate. Will they build the expertise within India over the next few decades? Do they want to exploit new opportunities as India grows into a 20-30 trillion dollar economy by 2050? The other option is to go abroad, make good money early in your career, and build a solid middle-class existence abroad. Hopefully, the Chandrayaan mission gives some answers to students struggling with these questions.

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