India's Road Less Travelled

by Lou Zacharilla

 

New York City, September 1, 2023--Think of it. We have a fourth nation within our swelling species that has engineered with typical industry excellence (always a requirement!) a device which with the thin fingers of a profound creator has touched the surface of the Moon. “Our Moon,” as we call it.

 

Our imaginations always felt the lunar landscape and now we are able to touch it – literally. Science and data compound and push us forward. We have learned that we can even touch it with our bare hand.  Based on measurements of the lunar soil we know we probably could press a bare hand against the hottest lunar soil without feeling uncomfortably warm. (If your hand hit a rock, however, it might not be so nice.) 
India’s new national lunar flagship, Chandrayaan, had no human hand with which to reach out to test the proposition. However human hands and brains engineered its landing approximately 69 degrees south latitude at a landing site called “Shiva Shakti,” words that symbolize the strength of the women who contributed to this mission, according to its Prime Minister.

 

Indians watch with pride the live telecast of their spacecraft Chandrayaan landing on the moon.

The landing was closer to the lunar South Pole than any craft before. As the current resident of the USA White House would say, “That’s a big deal.”

 

And a great adventure.  Great adventures are lubricants that trigger the imagination and the memory.

 

India’s great adventure landed me back to July 1969 and the American lunar mission. It transfixed the world. As a young boy in Upstate New York it did what I am sure India’s majestic moment is doing to young boys and girls in Chennai, Pune and Delhi.

 

Swollen with national pride I recall that mind-altering night. As luck – or divine intervention – would have hit, three Catholic priests showed up at our home for dinner to watch Neil and Buzz.  

 

The three were very different. A mix of saintliness, brilliant intellectual skepticism and petty nastiness. 

 

Father Neil (coincidentally) was a saint. A 1960’s style guy with a heart wide as space and with an almost unearthly sense of compassion. He ran a house of mercy for the most down-trodden addicts and impoverished in the City of Rochester.  Forever gentle, his wish was that this unifying moment would usher in real peace among people.

 

Father Jim was a bright guy. Intellectually brilliant, well read and maybe too keen a social observer for his own good as he looked over the landscape of that troubled era. He soon after  had a crisis of belief. He watched the Moon landing and could not come to any other conclusion than this was the beginning of the end for the mythologies and cultures he knew.  He left the priesthood and became a successful CFO of a company in New York. Ironically, he married an ex-nun! You can take the boy out of the country, but….

 

Father Richard was a jerk. Pure and simple. He was a cynical, petty human being who was suspect on many levels.  It would have been best to have him sent beyond the Moon, I thought. He was sarcastic and caustic about the entire episode and wanted only to gossip about his own parish’s most notable people.

 

I was enthralled by the TV. I was wondering all kinds of things. What the Moon smelled like for instance. Later on, the Apollo astronauts were quite specific. Moondust smells like burnt gunpowder. 

 

It didn’t end my string of questions.  Maybe that was the start of my podcasting career. www.sspi.org/podcast

 

I turned to Father Neil near the end of the night for some wisdom.  The man who would marry me and bury my father in later years as my family’s spiritual advisor said in his quiet way, “We are going to need to change if we are going to live peacefully there.”

 

I was more like Father Jim on that one. I didn’t see much hope but I know more now. I remain optimistic.  What I do know is that through the SSPI India chapter and the great effort by Jay Gullish of the USA/India Business Council we have seen an explosion of entrepreneurial activity and policy development in India. It is that nation’s time. That is clear. We are pleased that the India Space Association and others are part of our regular monthly working group.  

 

This is a new moment for a nation where many of the world’s great creative technical minds and genuine saints were born, taught and wander in their necessary way.  I wonder if that ancient DNA and the new one launched on the back of ISRO will balance its progress with Father Neil’s and Neil Armstrong’s single great aspiration: a giant leap.

---------------------------------

Lou Zacharilla is the Director of Innovation and  Development of the Space and Satellite Professionals International (SSPI).  He can be reached at: LZacharilla@sspi.org