Growing up in the 1970s, surrounded by the pioneers of the India’s space program, ’Dr Susmita Mohanty was always destined for a space-based career. For Mohanty, the influence of those pioneers was profound. “I could show up in anybody’s offices in the afternoon and they would make a cup of tea and say, ‘let’s talk about your new ideas’. I could talk to them about art, architecture, design, technology, politics. They were Renaissance men. And that’s really what shaped me,” says India’s first space entrepreneur.
Designing spaceships bridges the gaps between Mohanty’s two passions: architecture and space. The daughter of a former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientist, it’s clear how space became a part of her life. But architecture? Susmita credits her home town of Ahmedabad, India for that. “I grew up in a city which had great patronage of the arts and architecture and design. It was a city of textile mill–owning families who’d the best contemporary architects such as Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, B.V. Doshi, Charles Correa and the like,” she says. “I grew up in this amazing ecosystem where you have space, architecture and the National Institute of Design. Post-independence, a new India was being architected by visionary businessmen and scientists. I was raised in that environment,” she adds.
Mohanty argues that space exploration needs to move away from the traditional engineering-centric approach that space agencies like NASA have used since the 60s. “It’s time to embrace a multi-disciplinary approach,” she says. “We need to make sure that psychologists, sociologists, colour theorists, industrial designers and engineers work together to ensure that we pay as much attention to habitability standards as we do to safety and survivability.” Mohanty is clear that this will be vital for long-duration missions where socio-psychological well-being will be paramount for mission success.
In 2004, she and Dr Barbara Imhof co-founded Liquifer System Group (LSG), an aerospace architecture and design firm in Vienna, Austria, that brings together natural scientists, engineers and designers, to work across bionics, spaceflight, robotics and architecture.
In 2008, Mohanty moved back to India and co-founded the nation’s first private space start-up, Earth2Orbit (E2O). Her motivation was to see India emerge as a global space player whose ambitions are not limited to a government-run program. Through years of soft diplomacy, she played a pivotal role in opening up the US launch market for India, providing launch access to American companies to fly on the Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket – despite the 1998 US embargo and regulatory hurdles. International and local awards, media coverage and accolades followed, with Susmita hailed as ‘India’s space woman’.
Yet envisioning how we will travel and live in space is, in many ways, the realm of science fiction. Not surprisingly, one of Mohanty’s early mentors was the famous English science-fiction writer, science writer, futurist and inventor Arthur C Clarke. When Susmita decided to return to India after many years abroad, it was Clarke who told her this was a ‘strategic move’. “I said, ‘why do you say that, Dr Clarke?’ and he said, ‘well you know, everything began in the East – it’s going back there’. He cited the example of Chinese alchemists inventing gunpowder, and said, ‘No gunpowder, no rockets’.”
Mohanty now plans to launch an international space think tank based in Bangalore, to re-shape how and why we explore space. It will integrate eastern philosophy, planetary ethics and remove the Western hemisphere bias in discussions, accords, and directions, as well as the media reporting around space. “When the Americans launched Crew Dragon [the SpaceX spacecraft which carried four NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in May 2020], there was so much hype about it being historic. While it was historic because it used state-of-the-art technologies and was launched by a private company, they, as always, downplayed the Russians.”
The USA ’hasn’t had any human ferries after the shuttle fleet retired in 2011. That is a matter of shame given that NASA’s budget is $18 to $19 billion a year, and they need to show some gratitude to the Russians who provided that ferry for those nine years. But instead they always position it in a way that is ‘Oh, look, we did it!’. But what about your international partners who helped you get there for the last nine years?”
Mohanty points to another example of media bias; National Geographic called her because they were planning a mini-series to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the last Apollo landing. It was after the Chinese had landed a spacecraft on the moon for the first time. “I said to them, ‘you want to spend millions celebrating something that happened 50 years ago, but you are unwilling to acknowledge that there is a Chinese rover pottering about on the moon as we speak? The Americans last landed on the moon in 1972, the Russians in 1976. Only the Chinese have successfully soft-landed on the moon in recent years – once in 2013, again in 2019 and now again a couple of days ago with the Chang’e-5? It’s a big deal to successfully land on the moon – why aren’t you celebrating that?’” Mohanty feels her think tank can help neutralise this bias. “You need a pulpit – an entity – which is able to pose those questions, produce opinion pieces and look at international law and all of that. We need to move the centre of gravity to the Eastern and Southern hemispheres.”
She also wants to shift the motivations around exploration itself. “When Elon Musk goes around saying he wants to colonise Mars and behaves like a space prophet, I’m like, ‘come on Elon, tell me, what are your demographics?’ And the word ‘colonisation’ should be avoided because it is all about imposing Homo sapiens on other planetary destinations and going for mass extraction of resources. If we take that approach, then we will repeat exactly the same mistakes that we’ve committed here on our home planet. Outer Space is fast becoming the next Wild West.”
Mohanty says that during the Obama administration, the US Congress unilaterally passed legislation [the Space Act of 2015] which allows American companies to extract resources from the moon, asteroids and other celestial bodies. “They can own it. They can sell it. That goes against the altruistic principles which are enshrined in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1979 Moon Agreement,” she says. While Mohanty thinks updated or new treaties are needed, she also wants to ensure that space exploration isn’t dominated by resource exploitation, and that all countries have access to real-time, reliable, space traffic data. “We have the International Telecommunication Union giving Elon Musk the right to launch 42,000 satellites in lower orbit for his mega-constellation, called Starlink. Technically, if you ask me, that’s the equivalent of a land grab in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Elon’s Starlink is one of the biggest constellations, but there are others, too, and the space debris menace in LEO has reached catastrophic proportions already. Starting 2019, I have joined a small, but growing, international group of space experts who are starting to get vocal about the need for planetary ethics – for enforceable laws to move away from unilateralism to multilateralism.”
Mohanty has also turned both her personal and company’s attention to climate change and empowering young people to create a sustainable future both here and in space. With 600 million people – more than half the population of India – under the age of 25, Mohanty wants to inspire them to take control of their climate futures. “I want to bring Carl Sagan and David Attenborough to Generation Z, those born in this millennium, and the Millennials, those born after the Berlin Wall came down. I want to inspire them with the consciousness that I inherited from Sagan and Attenborough. I’m going to launch a movement called ‘we are all astronauts’, about the fact that we are living on a spaceship. I want to get these young kids to take the planet back from the likes of us, the big people, the adults, who have done a very poor job. So, take it back and make it liveable for your generation, because the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement doesn’t seem to be working,” she says.
Mohanty is hoping to get David Attenborough’s documentaries translated into all major Indian languages, as she believes films play a critical role in creating consciousness in young people. “They don’t strive as much as we did for things that they believe in. They even steer away from politics. I think politics and current affairs needs to be embraced by young people, who have been so disillusioned by politics that they are sort of looking the other way. And I want them to look this way and say, ‘You need to be engaged. It’s your future that’s at stake’,” she says.
Those early days spent debating with India’s space pioneers have clearly stayed with Mohanty, as she reflects on how little modern society has learnt from history.
“We are stuck because we have a Gregorian calendar and this 24-hour clock. I want us to think of time on a larger scale,” she says. “I want us to think of time as a hundred-year clock. It will help put things into perspective.”
She says if you think in 100-year clock cycles, then, “just four clocks away is 400 years ago – the Mughal dynasty in India and the Ming dynasty in China were among the wealthiest polities in the world, with 25% of the manufacturing happening in these geographies. When the Europeans were still busy with their crusades, the Indian subcontinent was already experiencing a cultural and intellectual boom where mathematics, architecture, philosophy, astronomy and high art were already flourishing,” says Mohunty.
“The word ‘emerging’ that is used in the context of India and China needs to be jettisoned, because there’s nothing emerging about these parts of the world. They are among the oldest civilisations on this planet, and now they’re returning to prominence.” What’s needed now is humility and a historical perspective,” says Mohanty. Above all, “we need to look at time in 100-year cycles, including for climate change. Let’s not think short term. Let’s think long term – for the sake of our home planet and the new ones we plan to inhabit.”
Earth2Orbit Website
Article by Kylie Ahern
Photo Credit: Siddharth Das
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