By Sudha Ramachandran

BANGALORE - With plans afoot for a totally indigenous manned space exploration program in the coming decade, India is gearing up to join an exclusive club of countries involved in human space flight. But first, India's space scientists will have to convince the country that the investment in landing a man on the moon is worth it.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) proposes to send an Indian into space by 2014 and to the moon by 2020, and it is discussing plans with the Indian scientific community. The first of the meetings, with some 60 top scientists from across the country, kicks off in Bangalore on Tuesday.

"There have been several studies already done internally at ISRO on the technical and financial feasibility of the project. The discussions on whether the manned mission is required will be based on these studies," said the director for information at ISRO, S Krishnamurthy. "Tuesday's meeting is going to be only about whether we should do it or not. The how and when will only come up much later."

Last month, ISRO chairman Madhavan Nair presented the plans to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and, according to reports in the media, the prime minister "did not say anything adverse".

A formal project report will be submitted to the government by the end of the year, and trials will start in early 2007. Things are expected to be firmed up in another three to six months. A small step on the road to the man-in-space mission will be taken in December or January when a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle will put a recoverable satellite in orbit as part of an experiment to perfect re-entry into the atmosphere.

There was a lack of interest in manned space missions until recently. "I don't see any specific advantage a manned mission to space can have over an instrument-based launch," Nair had argued as recently as late 2003. He has changed his tune and said recently: "I subscribe to the view that no robot or instrument can substitute the human brain," signaling a sea change in ISRO's position.

Indian space scientists pride themselves on the fact that unlike the space programs of most other countries that emerged from existing ballistic-weapons research, the Indian program was rooted in developmental objectives and set up with the eventual goal of having satellite-launch capabilities.

"NASA is interested in interplanetary exploration, looking at galaxies, asteroids and other planets. ISRO is first and foremost interested in looking at planet Earth and conceiving of applications for space to improve the quality of life down here," said Nair. India's space program has been an agent of change with achievements in the fields of education, distance learning, television broadcasting, water management, telemedicine and so on.

Its achievements in remote sensing have been substantial as well. India is competing internationally to launch commercial satellites and has met with considerable commercial success. Last year, Antrix, ISRO's commercial arm, brought in more than US$500 million - more than half of the operating budget for all of ISRO. It hopes to corner 10% of the market in less than a decade.

Should India decide to put a man in space and on the moon, it will mark an important milestone in the country's space program. It will be the first time an Indian will enter space on an indigenously constructed and conceived spacecraft.

Indians have been in space before, but they have hitched rides aboard spacecraft of other countries. In 1984, Rakesh Sharma, a squadron leader in the Indian Air Force, became the first Indian to enter space. But his feat was achieved aboard the Russian spacecraft Soyuz T-11 as part of a joint Indo-Soviet space program. And more recently, there was Kalpana Chawla, an Indian-born US citizen, who died aboard the US space shuttle Columbia.

If the government approves the plan, India will become the fourth country to launch a manned space mission after the Russians, the Americans and the Chinese.

Meanwhile, an indigenous unmanned mission to the moon is steaming ahead. Chandrayaan-1 (literally "Mooncraft"), an unmanned spacecraft, is due for launch in 2007-08. It will orbit the moon at a distance of 100 kilometers. If the mission goes as planned, ISRO would become the sixth space agency in the world - after the Soviet Union's, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the China National Space Administration - to have sent an unmanned mission to the moon. Interestingly, besides ISRO instruments, those of NASA, ESA and Bulgaria will hitch a ride on board Chandrayaan-1, free of cost but with an understanding that data from the instruments will be shared.

The Chandrayaan-1 project was opposed by skeptics because of its cost - about $83 million - among other reasons. The opposition to the manned missions is fiercer. The budget for the man-in-space mission is estimated at about $3.5 billion and the man-on-the-moon project would cost much more.

Questions are being raised as to whether a country with serious socio-economic problems - a quarter of its 1.1 billion population live on less than a $1 a day - should be squandering resources on sending a man into space. "For a country like ours with so many needs, this requires a national debate about the use of resources," Krishnamurthy has admitted. India's space scientists will have to convince the government that the investment in a manned mission is not money down the drain.

Critics suggest that instead of pursuing a manned moon mission, the Indian space program should specialize in low-cost access to space by providing the cheapest launchers in the business.

India's lunar ambitions appear to have been triggered in part by China's successful manned mission in 2003. Indian scientists say they are not overly worried about the Chinese space program. Although it started about a decade and a half before India's, India bridged the time gap pretty well. It launched its first satellite just five years after the Chinese launch in 1970, for instance. Indeed, India is ahead in almost all scientific and engineering aspects of satellite technology, even if the Chinese have launched more satellites.

Yet the fact that the Chinese space program is far ahead of India's in the military-satellite arena is cause for concern. Nair told New Delhi Television, "The Chinese have declared their plans and in that process it is not right for India to be lagging behind."

There are doubts as to whether India's manned missions will add much to the mountain of knowledge that has already been collected about the moon. Critics point out that the moon is the most studied object in the solar system, and that some 382 kilograms of moon rock were collected by the Americans over six missions, providing scientists with ample material for research. When even the Americans and the Russians have stopped their moon missions, why does India want to retread that beaten path?

One reason may be energy independence. Scientists believe that the moon has about a million tons of helium-3 - enough to satisfy Earth's energy needs for thousands of years. They are also looking at harvesting solar power from the moon. According to scientists, harnessing just 1% of the moon's solar energy could replace all of the fossil fuel power plants on Earth.

These findings have generated a new interest in the moon. Several countries have begun racing for a share in the pie. In late 2004, Europe's SMART-1 entered lunar orbit. Japan's Selene spacecraft, which is to be launched next year, will be followed by India's Chandrayaan-1. China, which in 2003 became the third country to launch a human into space, is planning its third manned space mission in 2008. And the Americans are planning to return to the moon by 2020. NASA aims not only to return humans to the moon, but it also hopes to use it as a staging point for a manned mission to Mars.

"ISRO now feels more or less on par with other countries in terms of space technologies. There is now a feeling that 20 years down the line, other countries would have explored the moon for minerals, and India must not be left behind," said Krishnamurthy.

It is clear that India does not want to be left out of the emerging scramble for the moon's resources. By sending manned missions into space, India is signaling that its ability in space technology is as good as that of other contenders and that it intends keeping in step with them in the new space race.

Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.)