Tag Archives: Gaganyaan
Watch the celebrations, on mute
Right now, Shubhanshu Shukla is on his way back to Earth from the International Space Station. Am I proud he’s been the first Indian up there? I don’t know. It’s not clear. The whole thing seemed to be stage-managed. Shukla … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds, Science
Tagged Axiom-4, Gaganyaan, Human Space Flight Centre, human spaceflight, Indian Space Research Organisation, International Space Station, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Shubhanshu Shukla
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India’s next man in space
NASA/SpaceX/Axiom will make their next attempt to launch the Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station on June 11. Axiom Space’s tagline for the mission is “Realizing the Return”, alluding to three of the mission’s four crew members, including India’s … Continue reading
Solve all our problems
This is xkcd #1232. When it came out I remember it was to rebut a particular line of argument against NASA’s lunar and interplanetary missions — that the agency was spending large sums of money that would be better spent … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged Elon Musk, Gaganyaan, game theory, human spaceflight, Indian Space Research Organisation, interplanetary spaceflight, NASA, SpaceX, sustainability, xkcd
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JPL layoff isn’t the fall of a civilisation
A historian of science I follow on Twitter recently retweeted this striking comment: While I don’t particularly care for capitalism, the tweet is fair: the behemoth photolithography machine depicted here required advances in a large variety of fields over many … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis
Tagged Artemis Accords, Gaganyaan, Jeff Nosanov, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mars Sample Return, NASA, NASA Watch
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What Gaganyaan tells us about chat AI, and vice versa
Talk of chat AI* is everywhere, as I’m sure you know. Everyone would like to know where these apps are headed and what their long-term effects are likely to be. But it seems that it’s still too soon to tell … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged chat AI, ChatGPT, crew module, electronic calculator, Gaganyaan, GSLV Mk-III, Hope probe, Indian Space Research Organisation, Lvm 3, S Somanath, Ship of Theseus, space programme, UAE, United Arab Emirates
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Gaganyaan: The ingredient is not the recipe
For all the hoopla over indigeneity – from ISRO chairman S. Somanath exalting the vast wisdom of ancient Indians to political and ideological efforts to cast modern India as the world’s ‘vishwaguru’ – the pressure vessel of the crew module … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Culture, Science
Tagged crew module, Gaganyaan, Indian Space Research Organisation, S Somanath, The Hindu
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Something more foolish than completing phase 3 trials in 1.5 months?
That the Union government and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had entered into a more intimate, but not necessarily more beneficial, relationship became evident in 2019 when then ISRO chairman K. Sivan trotted out a series of dubious claims … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds, Science
Tagged Balram Bhargava, Covaxin, Gaganyaan, human spaceflight, Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO, K Sivan
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What arguments against the ‘next LHC’ say about funding Big Physics
A few days ago, a physicist (and PhD holder) named Thomas Hartsfield published a strange article in Big Think about why building a $100-billion particle physics machine like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a bad idea. The article was so replete with … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged Big Science, Big Think, Gaganyaan, Large Hadron Collider, Matthew Strassler, Thomas Hartsfield
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