Chandrayaan and other moonshots

Let us not hijack the debate into a rich vs poor or IIT vs Regional College argument. Let us instead use Digital India and Chandrayaan as exemplars in the area of science, technology and innovation that can be replicated to make a thousand innovator and inventor flowers bloom in the country. This will be our true tryst with destiny

Speaking to a young group of students in the middle of September, I asked them if they understood the significance of the Chandrayaan success for India. And was surprised when someone said, “It’s just proof of the old statement that if you keep trying, you will eventually succeed.” This column is just to underscore how much planning and intelligence – both natural and artificial it actually takes to make missions like Chandrayaan a success and what we should learn from it.

To start from fundamentals, we have all understood by now that the mission had three objectives – to demonstrate safe and soft landing on the lunar surface, to demonstrate that the Rover could emerge from the Lander and rove on the surface of the moon and to conduct experiments on the moon’s surface. To the cynics who say, “So we found some Sulphur, what else did we achieve.” I would like to say that the real success of the mission was the complete achievement of all the three objectives, which opens the doorway for more and ambitious space exploration missions in the years to come.

For technology enthusiasts, the significant use of Artificial Intelligence is what makes us all proud of the country and the level of capability we have developed today, not just in space exploration but also in so many fields of scientific endeavour. Landing on the moon itself has multiple challenges because of the absolute lack of air, which renders all parachute options for a soft landing infeasible. In addition, the craters and rugged contours of the moon surface make it difficult to find the right spot, which led to the crash of Chandrayaan-2 as well as the Russian lunar lander that preceded Chandrayaan-3 by just a few days.

A significant portion of the credit should go to Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI was used to forecast the topography, track potential landing hazards and manage the descent of the lander. Prior to that, the entire design of the spaceship, the lander and the rover had been designed with AI to optimise the weight and design of each equipment and ensure high performance and optimal safety. After the landing, the sensors and cameras of the lander and the rover helped in processing images and calibrating the descent and subsequent movements of the rover by mapping all features and guiding the roving route. The extraction of insights from data on a real time basis has been the true success of AI and the successful outcome of Chandrayaan-3 and indeed the entire Chandrayaan mission was a triumph of successfully enhancing and finally, replacing human capability with Artificial Intelligence.

"If the Chandrayaan mission can truly be celebrated as an amazing moonshot, there are many other metaphorical moon- shots India has targeted and achieved over the past two decades"

Artificial Intelligence is slowly making its way into every type of human endeavour though it is arguable whether the excessive hype created over ChatGPT was an enabler or a dissuader for people to embrace it wholeheartedly. As in all cases (remember Cyber Currency and Block Chain?), Open AI and ChatGPT is just one use case of Generative AI which will become not just an augmentative force for human beings but also take over repetitive and time consuming activities from any job and leave the human free to innovate and feed back into the model that enables AI to augment its own intelligence. We are seeing this happen in India in proposal writing, industry research and so many other areas and it is a matter of time before every intelligent human uses AI in some form or the other. Will there still be some luddites who stay away? Of course, who ever said artificial intelligence could overcome natural stupidity.

If the Chandrayaan mission can truly be celebrated as an amazing moonshot, there are many other metaphorical moonshots India has targeted and achieved over the past two decades. The most emphatic of these has been the JAM (JanDhan Aadhaar and Mobile) trinity that has enabled the amazing UPI and shot India into the lead in Digital Payments and the use of Digital Public Infrastructure for social and business good. With the Open Network for Digital Commerce following close on the heels of UPI, the future will see multiple digital platforms ranging from agriculture to health to skills to SME clusters that will eliminate information asymmetry and enable price discovery and choices to be within reach of every consumer. When the history of India is written, the role of digital pioneers like Nandan Nilekani will surely be etched in bits and bytes of gold.

These achievements should give every Indian the confidence to reach for the stars and find inventions and innovations that can transform life and work. If the product opportunity has largely eluded us, more because of global marketing weakness than ideation limitations, its time to realise that the Chandrayaan mission is all about frugal innovation, designed and implemented by middle class folks who had nothing but the power of collective aspirations going for them. Let us not hijack the debate into a rich vs poor or IIT vs Regional college argument. Let us instead use Digital India and Chandrayaan as exemplars in the area of science, technology and innovation that can be replicated to make a thousand innovator and inventor flowers bloom in the country. This will be our true tryst with destiny.