Transcript for:
Dr. Somnath's Insights on Space Exploration

Dr. Somnath, welcome to the Renvi Show. Dr. Somnath. Sir, this was cheesy. Mr. Somnath.

We have achieved 4, 3, 2, 1. Got the moon. Zero. India is on the moon. Is ISRO thinking of a space tourism project?

We have a vision till 2047 now to send human beings to moon. Do you think our planet is visited by extraterrestrials? Absolutely not doubt about it.

There are aliens out in the universe. You're the chairperson of ISRO, sir? Yeah, yeah. I'm telling you. They will treat you like a earthworm.

I have to bring up a slightly current affairs topic next, which is Sunita Williams, ma'am. Astronaut Sunita Williams will be... Is there anything that we can do at ISRO in India? The only possibilities are... Especially when it comes to Chandrayaan 3, everyone's so full of celebratory emotions.

Like what have we learnt about the moon through the Chandrayaan 3? Many things. There's a little tiny part of me that feels like ISRO has some very very important projects that are kept secret away from the public eye for good reason.

Believe that and continue. What kind of conversations happen about Elon Musk within ISRO? Look at him, what he is doing.

It is rockets, it is reusability, it is the new spacecrafts he is designing. But if you were in a room with him? What would the conversation be like between you two? So what is his vision to move human beings to exosolar planets? I'll ask him straight.

Exosolar planets? Yes. The planets belonging to another star.

Would you be open to it? Teaming up with Elon Musk? Why not?

Definitely. Does NASA share that data with other space agencies? Nobody shares data with anyone.

But there is things that America probably knows about Mars that India doesn't right now. Of course they will. And there's things India knows about the moon that America doesn't. In my opinion, there could be something, yes.

Wow. Okay, in your whole career, like what's the strangest thing that you've learned about outer space? We all know that the universe is expanding. What we are talking to each other, there is a light coming out of our face. If it has a way to escape through this small window in this room and go into space, our image will be going into the space.

Even after we are dead and gone, the light that came out of us will be still traveling in the universe. And anybody looks at that light will be able to see us living, talking to each other. This is one of the most iconic moments in my own career because we have one of the icons of modern day India, Dr. S. Somna, the chairperson of ISRO, who also overlooked the Chandrayaan 3 mission that we all celebrated last year. In order to mark the success of the Chandrayaan 3, 23rd August every single year will be celebrated as National Space Day.

So on the first annual National Space Day celebration, We are going to be celebrating ISRO and speaking in detail about the multiple missions like the Gaganyaan mission, the Aditya Yaan mission, the Shukra Yaan mission and many other aspects of modern day space tech. If you're someone who enjoys conversations about outer space, about our solar system, about aliens, about black holes and about everything that our country is up to in the world of space tech, this is going to be one of the most memorable. conversations and one of the most iconic podcasts you'll ever listen to that's a promise because it's dr s somnath on trs dr somnath welcome to the renvi show Thank you so much.

How are you, sir? I'm fine. How's it like being on your first podcast, I think? Yeah, I think it is.

Okay. Yeah. Can I just begin by telling you how much the whole country respects you guys?

I usually reserve this part of my podcast for the end of the conversation, but I have to begin today's podcast by saluting you. Thank you so much. It's a great honor to listen from you. No, sir. Genuinely.

there's too much respect we all feel for you. Like it's the honor of our lives as a team also to be at ISRO speaking to the chairman. So thank you, sir. Thank you so much once again.

How's life generally at this phase? At this phase, after having worked for so many years in this space, it's all space, space technology, activities here, engaging with a lot of the stakeholders. All that day in and day out.

Okay. Is there any element of stress in your life? Of course, stress is an integral part of it.

And the whole question is how you manage it. Because, see, when we get good news from ISRO on the news, the whole country explodes with celebration. For example, now, August 23rd, it's going to be National Space Day. That's the impact of ISRO for our country. I can't imagine what it's like for all of you here.

In terms of, before Chandrayaan 3 happened as an event, what was the mood like here? the final result came through. Now, everybody was expecting that this time we are going to make it.

But there is always skepticism in such things. Whether have you done enough? Suppose it happens to not able to make it this time, what will be the consequence of it?

Many people are worried. But then the whole job of giving confidence to people. But the confidence shall not be based on any false narrative. It has to be on factual things that you have done, what possible things that can be done.

And we have done enough. So this measure of quantification, you know, justice to the whole work, that I had to do. Have you ever watched a movie called Chakde India?

Oh, yes. With Shah Rukh Khan? Yes.

You know, in the end, when the team wins the championship and there's that scene of them celebrating. All of them celebrating, yes. When Chandrayaan 3 happened, that was the meme that went viral.

That was the rest of India. Yeah, of course. And you would have seen it, all of them rejoicing on that day, you know, when it landed softly on the moon. Yeah, it was a huge day for our country. But was it similar for you?

Were you also going through something like what Shah Rukh Khan went through internally? Of course, internally, I was not without any words at that time. It was difficult.

But I was posing. You know, you have to swallow that moment, enjoy that moment. And that's what I was precisely doing.

Not really showing it outwardly. Not showing it outwardly. You would have watched me in the TV that I was not showing it at all.

But I mean, internally behind the scenes, away from cameras, were you showing it? No, no, no. I never show overjoy or sadness at all in any time.

What did you do that night when you were sleeping? I was happily sleeping. There was no celebration? No celebration. So see, many a times people watch this show, always wondered.

Some foreigners who came to launch satellites, they asked me, what do you do for recreation? More work? So you can understand that. Really? Yeah.

Wow. Because I think everyone who works here is genuinely passionate about space. Precisely. So it's not work that we are doing. We are enjoying the time that we spend here.

That's the key to mega success. Of course. And mega success is also noticed by other mega successful people like Elon Musk. He's also an inspiration for us.

Really? Yes, really. Let's talk about this, sir. Yeah, of course. What kind of conversations happen about Elon Musk within ISRO?

And most of the time when I meetings or any other place, we discuss designs, concepts. We quote Elon Musk. My younger people quote, I quote.

Why don't you look at him? What he is doing in his rockets, in his reusability, his new spacecrafts he is designing, the concept of constellations, technology that he is bringing in. We are amazed by the speed that he is able to bring.

And also the way he is able to go through the processes within the country. That's again another important thing. He's not just doing technology. He's also able to bring the technology to an ultimate result. That's a very tough thing.

For many people, they don't understand the technology and the politics of applying technology. The politics of applying technology. Yes.

Wow. Are you comfortable elaborating a little bit on that? Yes, of course I am. See, he had a vision to get a reusable launch vehicle. He was able to manage to get an engine which was developed by NASA.

Almost 10 years of money, 10 years of work, he was able to get in a private ecosystem. That was difficult in America at one point in time. He managed it within the system, possibly through a political influence. And after having realized the reusable rocket, possibly he has looked at it as numbers. Hundreds of launchers are available.

And for which satellite he can use it. Then he created the Starlink constellation. Okay, thousands of satellites he was able to launch, and most of the launches are for him alone. And today we know how he is utilizing the satellites.

And these satellites are not used just for communication purposes. It is used for the national utilization, global communication, where the entire U.S. is now dependent on it. So he made an approach, a concept, and made it into the nation. So this can be done only by a person who understands the system.

how the country works, how the decisions are taken, who are the influential people, who drives all the system. So he works with the political system, he works with the government, he works with the technologists, he works with the engineers. So that's really amazing.

What I love about him is he has his inner child alive along with everything that you're saying about all the technicalities, the people skills required to move the political needle a little bit forward. And then he's also having fun in the process. Yeah, it's a curiosity that you mentioned about the childlike nature.

Yeah. Do you keep a track of his tweets where he's cheerleading Isro? He has done many times.

Whenever he did, I have been observing. Have you interacted with him? Not really. I have watched him live performing in some of the astronautical congress functions. But if you were in a room with him, what would the conversation be like between you two?

I will talk about his future vision. For example, he talked about the reusable rockets. He is now talking about going to Mars and creating habitats for colonization.

See, one of the bigger challenges for space people is to... attain high speeds to reach distant planets, for example, exosolar planets. So what is his vision to move human beings to exosolar planets?

I'll ask him straight. Exosolar planets? Yes.

You mean outside the solar system? Exosolar planets are the planets belonging to another star. So we know the star we belong is the sun.

So for every star, there is a planetary system. But if there is a planetary system and there is a planet like Earth there, possibly we can go and live there. So the next star is Alpha Centauri.

There are... planets around it. Or even a star which is 40-50 light years away, also there are planets. So if they find a planet there, if you have reached there, how will you ever reach? What is the Alpha Centauri solar system like?

I do not know exactly the number of planets around it. It's difficult to find out. So we use it telescopes, special observational platforms to find out. Today, you know, almost 5000 exosolar planets have been discovered.

Out of that, almost 100 of them are possible to have life on them yeah okay they are possible that they have life on them or possible that human beings can go and settle there one day possible that only if you are able to travel at tremendously high speeds to reach there in your lifetime possible it's not possible you know in lifetime of 100 years you can reach there okay i have so many tangential questions because there is a segment we've planned about terraforming okay which is basically you know you go to a planet like mars And the way Elon Musk says it is that you just heat it up a little bit and add some bacteria on the planet. That's the very, very simplified logic of terraforming. But when you're talking about all these other planets, are you saying it from the perspective of terraforming them?

No, really, it need not be. Some of them may be already ready for us to occupy. For example, if the temperature is like Earth-like temperature, 20 to 30, and water is still in the form of water, it has an atmosphere similar to Earth. may not be similar, where the oxygen percentage could be lower or higher.

Still, it can be changed over a period of time to become habitable. But there could be some form of life living there. But if human beings go, they can live there without much difficulty. For example, if you have an atmosphere, itself is a great boon. You know, many of the planets don't have atmosphere.

You look at Mars, it has a very thin atmosphere. Because of that, there is a radiation issue, there is a low pressure related issue. Suppose the atmospheric pressure is almost two bar, assume.

It is better than... having a very low atmospheric pressure. So, I am sure that many of those planets will have a, will be just right for us to go and live there.

Wow. Yeah. This is also a little bit the child in you speaking of, right? Like, that's why you enjoy this job. I really find fascinating story around it.

Many a times when I interact with kids, I talk about this story. The one thing I gotta ask you is about this Mars colonization angle. I saw the conversation you did with Technical Guruji.

And you gave the example of Antarctica. You said that no country technically governs Antarctica, but every country wants to try and set up a base there. So it's good that India set up a base there. Now, 50 years from now, you will have to probably go and set up a base at Mars as well. And you said that it's important for India to think about that because otherwise we'll be left behind in terms of reputation at least.

Right? Yes, no doubt about it. Is this a conversation that... the scientists at ISRO have regularly about how we can actually put people on Mars over the next 10-20 years?

Yes, to start that conversation, in India, in ISRO's context, because we are talking about developing certain capability to send human beings to space through our Gaganyaan program, go to moon and land. Those capabilities are yet to be acquired by us, but I believe that those visions will be created in due course. At least we have a vision till 2047 now. to send human beings to moon. I am sure the next generation will take on this and then build the capability to go to Mars.

But all the ingredients for such a dream to happen is already there. Got it. Again, the one thing I know about space tech is that it builds up incrementally.

Yes, of course. Like one thing leads to another. For example, if we talk about Gaganyaan, right now the goal is to take Indian astronauts and put them in space.

After that mission is successful, which it will be, knowing ISRO's reputation. The next step would be to put them on the moon. Of course, yes. Not really on the moon.

The first part of the Gaganya mission is to send human beings to space, keep them in orbit in a very congested place, the crew module, bring them back. But then we are planning to build a space station, the Parthi Andresha Station, which will be a... A room like this, enormous space, and you can work there, live there months together, conduct experiments, come back and forth. So that will be the second phase of work.

So multiple people will go and work there for scientific, technical, or commercial pursuits. After that, we use that as a base to go to moon. Then possibly when the moon bases could be set up by that time. Moon bases?

Yeah. Wow. Like what you leave in a space station, why don't you go and live on the moon? It's possible.

And then people will ask you, you don't have enough space on Earth that you are living on the moon. The reason is simple. Moon is a place where you can actually create the second base for us to go further exploration.

It is difficult to travel from Earth because of that atmosphere. And if you have a base at moon, you can incrementally create the base. And from there, you will synthesize fuels, then create the build the craft and much lesser cost you will be able to travel beyond. What's your vision of that base? The base could be an underground base because in the absence of an atmosphere, the safety against radiation, micrometeor impacts, etc. can be well handled if you have an underground base.

So you need to dig and create a base underneath. Temperature will be benign. You can create a breathing space, working environment and then work from there.

All your antennas will be outside and you will be inside. You know, so... Especially when it comes to Chandrayaan 3, everyone is so full of celebratory emotions that very few people ask about what the rover is up to on the moon right now. That is the job of the folks at ISRO. So what's the kind of data being sent back?

What have we learnt about the moon through the Chandrayaan 3? Many things. That depends on the payloads that we have.

You know, we put something called instruments on board. There were five important instruments on Chandrayaan 3. We had... three on the Vikram and two on the Rhova, Pragyan. So the Pragyan had two separate instruments, one which will apply radiation, alpha particles limit. It will go and hit the materials on the surface.

From the material scatter, there will be a spectrometer which will measure what elements it is made of. So you can understand on the surface whether it is made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, silicon. You can distinguish from them. There was another instrument which is again a laser based instrument. So it will send a laser beam and once it hits the surface it will ablate it, fumes will come out of it and these fumes will be matched by a spectrometer.

This again finds out the similar manner the elemental composition. So what we did is the rover was moving around and then at different places it will stop, it will do this function, measure it, again go to a next location. So almost 100 meters it moved and did all the measurements and collected all the data.

And we had some interesting observation we published. It had also the cameras, two stereo cameras were there, so those images we collected. And we had three instruments on board Vikram.

One was to measure the seismic behavior. That's called lunar shake vibrations that you can measure. Moonquakes. Moonquakes, yes.

Moonquakes you can measure. And there was another one which was measuring the thermophysical characteristics of the regolith. The regolith is a material that constitutes the surface. So we put a probe into it.

send some current to heat it up. So once you heat it up, it will measure the temperature gradient. And from that you can measure how the conductivity, the electrical properties, things like that. Wow. Then we had a probe that was almost one meter long.

It was swinging open. Then it will measure the electrons around. You know, there is no atmosphere.

So because of that, it is charged. So this charging will happen day and night with the sunlight. So these charged electrons will rise up in the daytime, go down in the night.

So this was being measured using this. So I mentioned about all the five instruments now. I mean, the surface level conversation here is the moon economy. People believe, especially within geopolitical conversations, that over the next 20 to 30 years, after we are able to actually set up bases perhaps on the moon or send people more regularly to the moon, you'll be able to mine for minerals.

You'll be able to extract things from the moon's surface. And then you'll be able to sell them for money on earth. Is that a conversation that ISRO has?

Not yet. Because these are discussions that are happening in many levels, scientist level. But then the feasibility of that will happen only when you are able to move equipments to do it. For example, you know, you have seen a mining facility. Massive equipment, tons and tons of excavators, diggers, filters, processors, melting tools, heating equipments.

How to take all of them to moon? Okay. And it's very easy to tell that you will dig all the material and extract platinum, gold, helium, etc. out of it. But then a huge amount of transporting all these equipments up there from Earth to... moon surface and every transportation is hugely costly because the rocket can take only few tons maybe hundreds of tons not thousands of tons so that means our rocket capability has to increase so and that will happen only when the rocket becomes cheaper that's why the reusability and many other things are important how to become the fuel should be the only the costly right and the rocket should be able to reuse many times so That's the prospect that Elon Musk and others are giving, that you have a reusable rocket, you have a fuel which is methane, which is very, very cheap, and oxygen, which is anyway plentifully available.

So once you have a very low-cost rocket, you can transport all of this up there. Then bringing back also difficult to Earth. For example, you know how an material comes back to Earth?

If it enters Earth, it will all burn off. Nothing will enter Earth. So to bring back Earth, you need high-temperature protection, very complex vehicle like the space shuttle or the capsules.

And every landing is a complex process. So even if you have gold to bring back, it's very, very costly. You know what I'm visualizing, but I'm visualizing Dr. Somnath and Elon Musk back to back like this. Teaming up for the sake of the moon.

We should do. We should do. Yes.

Would you be open to it? Why not? Teaming up with Elon Musk. Why not?

Definitely. But we should be on equal footing to when you talk about teaming. Yeah.

Yes. I think a person like him would be open to it. He's literally mentioned ISRO so much on international podcasts.

I think he's mentioned ISRO more than he's mentioned NASA. Like in my eyes. Thanks to Elon Musk.

I'm really looking forward to the day where you meet him and something comes out of this process. For the sake of humanity again. Definitely. We'll be happy to do that. Right.

Because effectively every... piece of work at ISRO, while it makes India proud, it's effectively for all of humankind. Is that a responsibility you feel?

All of us feel about it because the whole space is such a unifying part. Once you get out of the surface of Earth, go to space, look at Earth, look at us as a fragile planet, the boundaries vanish, the entire humanity looks at it as one of our cradle of life and it is becoming our responsibility, it becomes our... burdening on us to see how we take responsibility to protect it. Whoever went to space, they were mesmerized by this view. I had never been to space, so I can't talk about it.

But those if I borrow the words of those people, those astronauts and cosmonauts who went up there, all of them were mesmerized by this look of Earth. And they speak about the similar narratives. Big blue ball.

Yes. But I think they're starting space tourism in a big way right now. over the next five years? It is happening. It is happening in a certain manner.

But I am not seeing it, you know, increasing it to an extent because of various reasons. One is it is still costly. Okay, it has to, the cost has to come down substantially. I am sure it will, with the new technologies, it will come down.

And we are also trying to see how our knowledge in this area can help in some Indian companies to come up with the tourism possibilities. But this tourism is only going up to 100 kilometers and then experience it for a little while. But I believe the real tourism is in going to space and stay for some time.

Or maybe traveling to planets. All this will happen provided then it becomes routine. See, everything becomes cheaper once you have a large number of people using it. The scale of operations becomes larger.

Today, the space activities are not of that scale, which will make it affordable to much of the people, society, yes. Is ISRO thinking of a... Space tourism project?

ISRO is an enabler. I will enable private companies, industries that are willing to take up such projects, happy to cooperate. Why not build it out yourselves?

See, that is the commercial goal of it. And right now we are focusing on technology development and creating those technologies within us for us, the industries, to take on. This is our mandate.

So even for the rockets, as you would have seen that we developed the rocket, all what have been productionized, we move to industry for them to commercially exploit. And we go back and work on a better system. So this will be the process.

Even for tourism, that will be the model. But it will be a profit generating service. It has to be. Because unfortunately, we are not business people. Unlike Elon Musk, he knows both sides of the job, technology as well as business.

So we concentrate on the... technology side of it. The business side I would like to be handled by industries who are much better qualified to do it. Have you visualized yourself in a spacecraft looking down at the big blue ball 10-15 years from now?

I always dreamt of being lying on moon looking at earth with a one-way ticket. With a one-way ticket? Yeah.

Why? Never to come back to earth. And explore the moon.

Forever. Go to the dark side. And sleep forever there. And say hi to the possible extraterrestrial life.

Maybe. Does that fascinate you Adam? It fascinates of course. Aliens.

Aliens always fascinates yes. What aspect of it? See, this is a very interesting question. Alien we call are intelligent creatures, living things, sometimes more intelligent than us or not that much intelligent than us. See, we call ourselves an evolved creature, no?

You know everything, you know how to communicate technologies all with us. But just imagine, just 100 years back, you were nothing. You were not having these microphones, these cameras, these lights, the communication systems, the television, nothing was there.

Just 100 years back. Our history is not 100 years. Our history is millions of years. The whole human craze evolved over millions of years. But in the last 100 years, you achieved all of this, to talk about going space and talking about aliens, etc.

Just imagine there is another civilization out there which is just 200 years behind you. They are very good, but they don't have these technologies. Just otherwise you imagine there is another civilization which is 1000 years ahead of you. 1000 years is nothing in the cosmic scale, you know, you understand that. So they will be so evolved.

In 100 years you can make this much of progress. Just imagine in the next 100 years, where will you be? Or assume in the next thousand years, where will you be in terms of the progress of technology?

So then a society or evolution or an alien system, which is a thousand years progressive than you, will be always here. They must be listening to your podcast. They know what we are and they will treat you like an earthworm. For us, we are nowhere.

So I always believe that there is an alien around us, much evolved. Because we are not the one. That has come in the recent times.

We were the very recent origins of life form. Possibly there are origins of life and much evolved life everywhere in the universe. No doubt about it.

I'm loving speaking to you, sir. I feel like I'm talking to a big brother who thinks in a similar way about aliens, about extraterrestrial life and science. The thing is often when one speaks about these kind of topics, you're rejected.

by large sections of society because as one grows up in the world, you're told to kill off your inner child. But I feel that that's very important for the sake of imagination, creativity and therefore your work. Because there's a difference between being scientific and scientific. Scientific helps you discover the unknown. Scientific makes you reject the unknown.

Maybe that's a good definition. But let's actually speak about this alien situation, sir. How come... UFOs are only spotted in America and South America. That's where you hear most of it.

See, many a times these type of observations are much more feasible in the northern latitudes, southern latitudes. See, you know equatorial region are always cloudy. If you look at Africa, India or the South Asian, all those nations are in the equator.

The European, northern European and American are in the northern latitudes. And on the southern latitude you don't have any nation other than Australia. So if any events of this nature, especially the events in the sky where there is, for example, auroras, you are able to see in the northern side.

The solar-related effects are mostly seen in the northern side. Even the cyclones and other activities are more on the other side, not on the equator. The equator has different climatic conditions. And mostly it is covered. The sky is mostly dark, not blue.

If you go to US, you will see the sky to be more bluer than in India. It's not due to pollution alone. It's due to various, the content of water vapor in there and many things.

So this is scientific. Now there is non-scientific reason. Americans have a nature to detect so many things all around and make a story out of it. And many of the UFO stories are mostly fabricated stories, not the real stories.

Many of them are. Yeah. Some of them might be true.

May be true. Because I can't comment on it because I have not seen it yet. But do you think our planet is visited by extraterrestrials? Absolutely, no doubt about it. My conscience says, I don't have a proof.

You're the chairperson of ISRO, sir. Yeah, I'm telling you. It comes out of my earlier statement that there are aliens out in the universe. Aliens means living systems are there, cultures are there in other parts of this universe. Then they would have definitely visited us if they are ahead in technology than us.

Say, 1000 years, 10,000 years ahead. 10,000 years again is also a minuscule time scale in the evolution of the universe. Just imagine a society which is 10,000 years ahead in technology compared to us.

Where will they be? They will be frequently coming and going out of Earth without ever knowing it. It's the equivalent of us keeping lions in a zoo.

We are the lions in the zoo for them. Precisely. Like a planet is the zoo. Precisely, yes. Do you think that they would be benevolent or malevolent?

In either way, I will be happy never to be in touch with them. Really? I will tell you why. Yes.

There is a reason. See, the biology is such that we are evolved out of a common biology that connects every living creature on the surface of earth. Whether it is plant, whether it is bacteria, whether it is fish or animal.

And we are one and the same. You look at the genomics, you will understand this one and the same. There is no nature which is a protein which is different in nature on the surface of Earth.

Everything evolved out of single possible life form. So we are all connected in some manner. But suppose something that evolved in another planet would have been synthesized in an entirely different manner. It may not have the similar genome structure, it may not have the similar protein structure, and it is utterly dangerous to for all...

two life forms to come in contact with each other. The moment it contacts with each other, something has to overtake the other. This is the nature of the life.

One will not allow the other one to survive. It has to be overtaken and destroyed. So unless they have a conscience above this, they realize these two are different and we need to remain disconnected in terms of the body or the chemistry of it and keep that apart. and work together to find a solution for us to meet each other. Not at the level of the mind and the thought, but at the level of the body.

If that doesn't happen, it will cause destruction either to them or to us. Basically, they might be carrying some kind of diseases. I'm not talking in terms of disease. It's in terms of the way in which we live.

The form of the body, our blood, our way we walk. For example, oxygen. We breathe oxygen. What is the guarantee oxygen is the gas that they need for us to let them to live?

We don't know. In fact, I have seen a science fiction novel in which they breathe methane in one planet. There is another. And they float on the air with a huge balloon on them. There was a NASA documentary on it.

So such forms are possible. And they come in contact with us. It will be extremely dangerous for us.

Or we in contact with them will be dangerous for them. Do you believe in any of these theories like the lizard people or the Anunnaki would say that? Probably they've taken human form and they are with us right now on this planet.

Because if they are 10,000 years ahead of us, they would have accounted for even this biological problem. Possible, possible. They would have found out a solution.

I don't have a solution today to make these two work together, but they would have already found out a solution. We're just two lions talking to each other right now. Those are the human beings outside the cage.

True, true, true. Yeah, we can talk like that. Do the scientists at ISRO talk about extraterrestrial life to each other?

There are many people in ISRO who are fascinated by all of this. So whenever we're in free time, evenings, We converse in free time. Possibly we talk about all of this. Especially with my younger colleagues, I spend a lot of time. While I wish to ask you so much more about science and engineering, there is an inner child version of me that also wants to ask you about the spiritual aspect of being a scientist.

Now, this is also slightly in the domain of neuroscience. Long story short, they say that there's a logical part of your brain and an emotional part of your brain. So when you are asleep, you go from your logical part of the brain being more active to your emotional part of the brain being more active. That's why before an exam, if you study, when you wake up the next morning, you remember it better because your brain is able to assimilate that information much better.

Yes. But parallelly speaking, if you study the history of science on our planet in the last 300-400 years, there's countless scientists who say that they got answers to a problem in a dream. they understood what to do next in a dream. It's perhaps just the emotional side of the brain processing all that data. And the spiritual way of looking at it is, it's a higher dimension that's placed those ideas or those concepts within the mind.

How do you look at this? Because... Very interesting part of discussion that you're opening up.

No, there are many elements to it. See, I must tell you, human mind is such a powerful machine. May not be the right way to use it.

Powerful system in which what you feed into it, it can synthesize in many ways based on your discipline. So when you talk about the disciplining, your mind is in sort of a training. A random mind cannot synthesize data.

That's why in our system, in Indian way, we always taught them to concentrate. So once you start concentrating on a given problem so deep into it, it shows up the answers. It has been the case for most of those scientists who worked on this topic.

Your ability to concentrate has a phenomenal effect. Swami Vivekananda talked about it long back, how when he reads books so fast, that he was able to assimilate everything by scanning it, not by reading it. So this shows the ability of every human being to concentrate, differ based on his training. So if you train yourself, you can assimilate it very fast, you can find out solutions to problems because you are able to connect between the knowledge that you have. Knowledge is nothing but what you have assimilated over periods of time and your experience.

Connect with that, you are able to find out a new solution. The spiritual part comes as a different item at all. Even I am talking about your day-to-day, non-spiritually talking itself. Till now it was neuroscience.

Neuro part itself. It is explainable. That even Newton said once that if you have no answers to a problem, you define the problem.

You convert that problem into an object and bring it in front of you. You define a mathematical problem, you define it as an object. Place it in front of you.

Look at it and concentrate on it. Then leave it and do the remaining work of your life. All of a sudden you will find the answer. So every time that you have to remember that problem is in front of you, you are not forgetting it.

It is there in your mind very actively kept. And if you can do that, just imagine, can you even concentrate on one topic for 10 seconds? Your mind...

No. deviates. Even that is not possible for human beings. Even two seconds is a great, great thing if you can do. So ability to concentrate is a phenomenal capability. Have you had any experiences like this at ISRO while you're trying to solve a problem and you feel you've been helped from a higher place to achieve your result?

Answer is yes. Of course, if I should not be, you know, I should be sincere to myself. Many a times when I sit.

To review a problem or an issue with all my colleagues, not alone. In fact, I get charged up to think and many a times I feel myself that though I may not be knowing everything about it, I have an answer. And many a times the direction that we choose, the approaches that we take are benefited by those type of support. No doubt about it. So you're able to see the vision in your head in order to achieve the result.

No doubt. Yes, it is there. And provided you are able to concentrate, you are able to understand there are higher powers working, then definitely those type of support will be there. Do you see dreams where you are helped?

No, never. It's just in the moment at the workplace. Only at the workplace when you are on it. Dreams never helped. I think this is a good point to talk about going from Chandrayaan 2 to Chandrayaan 3. I remember seeing the Guruji interview where you said, I think for one year you did an analysis.

on what could have been done even better. Can you briefly tell us in like three or four points what, you know, was figured out in that one year? I know three or four points is too less.

But for the sake of the audience. So we know that most of the mission was very, very, very much achieved. For example, the rocket put the satellite in the perfect orbit.

It took from that orbit to raise the orbit to reach the moon. We lowered it to 100 kilometers. We initiated the lander landing only towards the last phase. We had a tumbling of the rocket and it did not touch, only just 300 meters.

So we understood the problem is a very minor problem. But then when we went into deep, we understood the minor problem always manifests in many ways. This is the way in which all complex technological problems appear.

We call it window of opportunity. Suppose you imagine a room, then there is an outer room, another room outside, a third room outside. There are rooms around the rooms.

And there are windows aligned. If you open a window, you can see a next window. If you open that window, you can see a third window.

If all windows are open, then what is inside the room can escape through it. We call it a failure. It's a failure propagate.

If one of the windows is closed, it cannot propagate. It will get contained. So no failure happens if one of the windows is open. If at least one of the windows is closed, the failure doesn't propagate.

A failure happens only when multiple windows are open. And they're not only open, they're aligned to each other. If they're randomly placed, still you cannot see outside.

So when they come aligned like that, failure happens. So we looked at, in this case, which are the windows that were opened and how they got aligned. So this makes a lot of analysis. Some of them are related to software. Some of them are related to the assumptions that we went into the designing of that software.

Some of them went into the performances of the engine, whether it was at the right level or it was up or down. So we found at least five different. elements of it got aligned to make this failure happen.

If one of them has not happened, this landing would have been perfect. It was a fantastic finding and what we did is after finding it we have to prove it. That this is how it happened. These are all hypotheses.

Unlike a car accident I always tell, I cannot collect the car and bring back to find out whether the brake failed or the site, the lander is still on the moon, I couldn't bring back. So I have to synthesize a case by computer simulations. or by mathematically, then we have to prove it. So we created another set of hardware, we tested it, and then found out where it has gone wrong.

And we proved the hypothesis is like this. And we found it is find out correct. This is why they say rocket science is the most difficult science.

It is difficult. And many a times I can tell you, even in the first year, we couldn't find all the reasons. And the real, one of the very crucial failure case was discovered only on the fourth year.

After we realized the entire flight hardware and we were testing it, on a fine day, a new issue was shown. And we found out that is one of the most crucial issues. And it was discovered after four years.

Just randomly it was discovered? Randomly. This is where that spiritual helping hand also came.

This is definitely, yes. It was destined to succeed. But then it happens only when you put enough of effort. Then only it will show up.

If you simply keep quiet and think about it, nothing will be shown in front of you. Right. I have to bring up a slightly current affairs topic next, which is Sunita Williams, ma'am. She's India's daughter in some ways.

Of course she is. She's an Indian-American, currently stuck in space. And all that the internet says about her is that they blame it on Boeing, which is a private company, going about their space tech.

They say that there's a fault in Boeing space tech. And one of the solutions is, again, Elon Musk's SpaceX is launching a rocket, I think, in September. September of this year.

So that is the rocket that's expected to help it. Is there anything that we can do at ISRO in India? Right now, we can't do anything as a direct help because we do not have a craft that will go there and save her. That's not possible.

The only possibilities are either from Russia or from US. US has the Crew Dragon vehicle which can go. Russia has the Soyuz which can go and bring them. So either of these only can save them.

I don't see there is a serious issue at this moment. Of course, the Boeing Starliner showed some anomaly, but they don't want to take risk, it appears to me, because it has shown up some issues in the past, even before launch. You know, the launches were postponed earlier many times, and finally they took a chance and launched.

But they don't want to take the risk in return. Return is more dangerous than onward flight. So that's why they are keeping there. And I am aware of that Boeing has been doing contracts or tests in the ground to prove they are good. But the results review and clearances are not happening.

Maybe they will go by the crew dragon and send it up and bring them back. But that depends on... Human spaceflight cannot be just like that happening. So they have to schedule it and plan it and all that. Possibly that's all they are waiting for.

What's her reality right now in space according to you? You heard their family speaking about her. They said she's at her most comfortable place on earth.

So I must be, she must be enjoying chilling out there. This is a good point to talk about Gagan Yarn as well. Oh, yes.

The kind of curious question I have, I have some cricketer friends who are very intelligent. Again, they send their congratulations as well. This is Krunal Pandya and Hardik Pandya.

And they sent in a question, which is... What are the personality traits that ISRO has looked for in the astronauts selected for the Gaganyaan mission? And what was the first discussion about the selected astronauts? See, they are skilled people. They are Air Force pilots, fighter pilots.

And not just they are the pilots, they were trainer of pilots. And they have passed those exams, they were working as first-time trainer pilots, ready to fly a new aircraft. that type of skill they have. They have not skilled in one aircraft. I know Going through the bio data, they can fly any aircrafts including helicopters and other fighters, transporters.

Such skill is one of the few of the best in the series. But when you come and work in ISRO as becoming an astronaut, it's a different world. They are not in the Fauji boundary where they have a specific task, training, etc.

They become students back here. They are learning aeronautics, they are learning rocket science, they are learning the... Design is the craft.

And mind you, for the Gagandian, they have come as the first-time astronauts. There is nobody to train them, no senior here. So they are the creator of the Gagandian program.

And even the craft they are going to fly are going to be created by them. They are going to advise us and help us to create what all features they need to have. So in that manner, they need to have many talents.

The first thing, they are going to become engineers. Though there are fighter pilots, they are going to be trained in astronautics, aeronautics, mechanics, machine, mission design, everything. So they will finally become as good of an ISRO scientist. So that is the ability to understand mathematics, science, engineering to a certain extent or reasonably high extent.

So they are doing projects in that direction to train themselves. Wow. Okay.

And the second part of it is they are going to handle complex problem which demands a lot of physical capability. And that physical capability need to be coming through rigorous training. Fitness. Fitness is one part of it, but training to handle certain conditions like high acceleration.

By fitness alone, it will not come. Some people are not capable of handling high acceleration, even they are very fit. So they have to have many capabilities.

Also, there are psychological balance of handling situations. They should work with people of different types. They should be able to understand the critical situations.

When an emergency happens, they should not become panic. to do some things. So there are many elements of psychological, neurological tests and examinations. And they need to work as a team of various people.

So how they work as a team, how they contribute to this, are they balanced in terms of their approaches in dealing with others. So many such aspects are addressed. Okay.

There was a very detailed selection process. There are senior people from various levels like medicine, medical, flying people, engineers. They all work. meet together to understand them and select them. But perhaps the base level requirement is the technical skill, which is being a fighter pilot.

Yeah, because that itself puts them at some 80% level. We need to look at only that 20%. So your selection pool was just the Indian Air Force?

Yes, only Indian Air Force. Damn. Yeah, and from that Indian Air Force, only the pilot trainers, not even fighter pilots. You know, there is a dream that a lot of kids see all over the world.

Yeah. They say they want to become an astronaut when they grow up. Yes.

Now, because this is the first set of Indian astronauts, perhaps they'll be able to train the next generation well. But even for the next generation of astronauts in India, would you only select them from the Indian Air Force? No, no, never. See, we have just begun the Gaganya program.

The first of the astronauts are always from flying squadrons of air forces. But later, you will see that they come from every box of life. There will be scientists, there will be the mission specialists, technocrats who can do certain scientific missions, but they will all have to go through the training. Because flying in a spacecraft of this nature, going to space and surviving requires certain skills. That can be acquired over a period of time, but they don't have to be necessarily Air Force pilots in the long term.

When we create a pool of 30-40 people in the coming days, I'm sure common people who are genuinely interested to become an astronaut will be having an opportunity. Okay, back to talking about slight science fiction though. Oh yes.

Have you watched Interstellar? Of course, many times. Right? Enjoyed it?

Of course, yes. Accurate depiction of space according to you? Not exactly. It is a little bit of drama there. It is needed for movie, that's added.

But they tried to be reasonable to the physics. Physics is not violated, of course. In terms of how they described the black hole?

Yeah. how they showed it. Are black holes a conversation that happened at ISRO?

Not only conversation, we have sent a satellite to study black holes. It's our ExpoSat. X-ray polarimeter satellite is a specific satellite to look at black holes and how black holes accrete or rather pull the material out of another star and study using X-ray that is emitted through the process through its polarization. So we are studying black holes.

And we found new learnings? Of course, we have seen. There are...

Many of them are already catalogued, black holes are catalogued, and this can be looked at by using it and study their nature and behavior. We have another satellite called Astrosat which also looked at similar bodies like neutron stars, nebula, like that. In your whole career, what's the weirdest thing you have learnt about outer space? There are so many things.

I don't have an answer but I'll tell you. See, we all know that universe is expanding. Is it not?

You have heard about it. So, if you send a light beam out there, it must be travelling forever. So, it is also going away along with the universe which is expanding. So, the light cannot be stopped. So, if it is not stopped, the light will continue to travel.

Is it not? So, what we are talking to each other, there is a light coming out of our face. If it has a way to escape through this small window in this room and go into space, our image will be going into the space.

Yes. Yes. It will travel forever. And if someone far away at, say, 5 billion years later, capture the light in his eyes, they will be able to see us.

It's a fact. Parallelly, while sitting here on Earth, if we develop a technology, we'll be able to see something from 5 billion years in the past. My story is slightly different here.

It's like, this is the point here. Even after we are dead and gone, The light that came out of us will be still traveling in the universe, and anybody who looks at that light will be able to see us living, talking to each other. And if you just imagine that, it feels like a great dream for me. And it is not just a dream, it's a reality. That's why when the James Webb Telescope launched recently, to look at the origin of the universe, was able to look at deeper into the universe and see up to 12 billion light years back, what was the nature of the universe.

It was able to see and take images. Think about taking a photograph of something which existed 12 billion years back today. Isn't it surprising?

So when I think about it, I really many a times I become speechless and think about it. Have you become more spiritual over the course of your journey? I was always been. I can only say when I think about it, I become more spiritual. Yes.

Okay. You realize how small we are. Of course we are. Very, very small. Right.

It has already been told by many people. This is a question I've asked a lot of monks. And I think you're nothing less than a monk in some ways. What is the purpose of outer space?

Why did God even create such a vast outer space? He did not create for any purpose. We are only assigning purpose to it. He is there because he is there. In my eyes, I felt like God created outer space to show his own size.

That I created this ever-expanding thing which is infinitely large. That is something different in terms of statements which are possibly not my origin, my own original thinking it may not be. I can tell you that the omnipotent God that you are referring to. It's the universe itself. There is nothing else.

And the universe is there like this because he wants to feel it. He or she wants to feel it. So all of us are here for experientially knowing the universe in different facets of it.

That's all the answer. We human beings are here because the universal power wants to experientially know itself. What is it being me?

That's it. Have any of our satellites caught any signals from outer space which seem to have come from an established civilization? None of us, none of our satellites have an ability to even depict them. Satellites generally don't have that ability. Generally such things are done by ground-based measurements like radio telescopes or such scanners, frequency scanners which have the ability to look for such faint signals.

Have we received any? We do not have. There's such facility in ISRO.

Okay. There are observatories of that nature which looks at radio measurement of the universe. For example, in Pune, there is a GMR and the UTI has a telescope of that nature and world over there are such telescopes which look at radio telescopes, looks at such phenomena or picking faint signals from other universes.

Any idea of any faint signals? We have read enough of that in many articles, books, etc. about it. But I do not... have first-hand information or knowledge about it.

Does it fascinate you at all? Of course it is fascinating. For example, I was reading a book in that direction about one of the observators in Chile where they have been continuously observing, listening about some of these noises, which has a pattern to see that the signals are of this nature are coming. So there is some civilization out there sending us signals. Could be.

It could be a civilization. It could be a... Electromagnetic noise coming out of celestial system itself, for example, supernovas or black holes, they also emit various types of electromagnetic radiation. It could be that, for example, a spinning black hole will be emitting a certain amount of radiation at a fixed pattern because their speed of rotation is constant. So it has a directionality, it is very high power electromagnetic beams it may be ejecting.

Possibly that's what we are picking. Or they may be resonating each other and picking. So we may get confused by physical activity to a civilization. We can't tell. Okay, fine.

Back to talking about ISRO then. Yeah. Where our technologies in India stand right now. If there is a manned mission to Mars, say Mangalyaan 3 or 4. 4 or 5. 4 or 5. So you'll send rovers till then. See, we are already having plans to send rovers.

landing on the mass which is we are thinking why not we do in the next mission so that's one of the goal sending human to Mars is a possibility but then today we do not have capability in terms of rockets you know the type of the rockets that are required are much more massive so that has to be developed in the due course you mean the technology doesn't exist technology exists scaling up money money yes money investment so that's what is lacking I don't think that we are lacking in any technology. Can I ask you bluntly how much money is required? For example, if you just want to go to moon and go and send a man on moon, we have to spend at least 2 lakh crores.

For one? For that first mission to take place. Okay, that 2 lakh crores, I don't need to spend tomorrow.

It has to be spent over some 25 years. Then we will have enough of stuff to do it. Then going to Mars requires money of that nature. So whether we are ready to invest that much money? For a country like India, it is possible still today.

Though it may be a huge money, with a nation with 38 million lakh crore worth of annual budget, it's not a bad number. Spending one lakh crore, I'm not talking about one or two lakh crore in one year. I'm talking about in 20 years. So it's a money affordable for us. That's why we are talking about manned mission to moon.

So with a nation which is going to become a third powerful economy of the world in the coming years, in my opinion, we should be willing to invest that much money. Have you told PM Modi this? I am telling continuously everyone.

Wherever I get an opportunity, yes. What has he said? He is all for it. I am very sure about it.

But he is a very practical person. And he will wave. merits of what we are going to do against various other priorities our nation is looking for. So once I am very sure about it, a powerful economically advanced nation will naturally go on for it.

And his first step is, first vision is to make India economically a progress nation. Then all of this will follow. There is no doubt about it. That's just how economics works. You're supposed to first think wide, then think deep in domains.

It will happen. What did PM Modi say between Chandrayaan 2 and 3? Because I'm sure there was some stuff said to the whole team at ISRO behind the scenes. So what was his message then?

See, he has been all the time telling he supported us. Even after the failure, he was there at our control center. The next day he came, consoled all of us. Then told us that though this mission we could not soft land, much of the mission was accomplished and we are very near to it. And we need to overcome and then he approved the second mission.

Without his approval, Chandrayaan 3 would not have happened. So, you know, his support is very much there. And all throughout that, he has been taking regular reviews to understand what is the progress.

And on the Chandrayaan 3 also, we briefed him, convinced him that we are going to make this time. So, the support was always there for me. I've seen enough of your interviews to know how much you highlight the mental concept of frugality within ISRO.

Yes. In terms of at every level. there is frugality for the sake of cost effectiveness. That's why these narratives of us using only 10% of the budget of NASA for the same projects. So while we conceive a project, while we think about a project, we must bring in sensitiveness to the cost.

Practicality. Practicality. And we must also be sensitive to the part that money is not brought from our own pocket.

It is actually public money. Taxpayers. And once your taxpayer's money is there, we must be answerable to every price that's spent.

And this must be told again and again and again. There is a nature of human beings. to think away from it. Because you don't understand, see when you spend crores, for your personal worth, you may not be spending that much money. Government money, when you spend, you must be very conscious about it.

And that consciousness puts us to do and don't do unwanted things and do only what is necessary to achieve the goal. And that too, the questions of reuse. See, when I was a project director, every hardware after testing, I sent back to the workshop, refurbished it, reused it. In many places, what will happen is it will be thrown out.

It is anyway tested hardware, throw away. No, we're never allowed. Where if you can repair and reuse it, you'll repair and reuse it. Bring down the total overall, no. material procurement to a barest minimum. Even scraps, I have worked on it to convert it into useful things.

So, once you have that thinking in your mind, you'll find solutions for it. Jugaad. Yeah.

That's a part of Isro's mindset? It's a culture, the mindset, yes. Okay.

This is because of Dr. Sarabhai. Of all the generations of people came after him also to convey the similar sentiments. Okay.

I have to bring up a meme at this point. Oh, yes. I remember this went viral after Chandrayaan 3, I believe.

Okay. So the meme went like, Avatar film in 2009, the budget was $237 million. Interstellar was $165 million. The Martian was $108 million.

And Chandrayaan 3 was $75 million. Did this meme reach you? Yeah, of course. Okay. How do you feel about that?

No, we knew it already. about the frugality, the cost-effectiveness of a work is well known, but I don't know about the cost of those movies. I still don't know how they spent so much money to build a movie. I must be educated on how to spend 175 million and still make a movie.

I think it's like frame-by-frame graphic designing. Maybe somebody is charging them too much. You know where the graphic design studios are? Mumbai.

Mostly here in India, yes. So they are charging them too much. Of course, you'd be happier with even higher budgets, right?

Sure, yes. Right? No, we need higher budget. If you have to achieve those goals that I mentioned, we definitely need.

And it's coming. I am very sure about it. Okay.

I have a dear friend, Abhijit Chawda. I don't know if you've seen any of his podcasts. You have. Okay. Chawda, sir.

So, he is very, very passionate about ISRO. And he's taught me everything that I know about space and astrophysics also. So, a lot of this conversation is happening because of what I learned from him. He feels fiery about the fact that...

ISRO deserves even higher budgets than it gets. But you're saying that things are going upwards, right? Yes, definitely.

So expenditure monitoring tells you that you need to spend the money that is targeted for every month. So there is a monthly target and quarterly target, yearly target monitoring. Everything is happening. Even with all of that, we are still having...

Excess. Yes. So that means we are never short of money.

We are short of programs. Possibly if you add new programs, we'll have more money. Did everyone at ISRO watch Mission Mangal? Yes, yes.

Yeah, all of us watched, yes. How did the ladies at ISRO feel about Mission Mangal? You would have seen them, all of them, in the Chandrayaan Thrill program. They were all there.

There are many women part of this mission, but of course they don't do cooking in the control center. How did everyone at ISRO feel about Mission Mangal? No, it's a very, you know, entertainer.

So we look at that as an entertaining movie and give some aspects of the life in this role. Yes. Back to astrophysics, sir. Thank you.

Are you liking this conversation till this point? Having fun? Oh, yes, of course. Did you expect I'll ask you about aliens and this kind of stuff? It's always a question most people ask.

You're bored of answering it? No, no. Every time I find something new to put into it.

Okay. Can we talk about Europa, the moon? Yes. It's the moon of Jupiter. Jupiter.

Right. Apparently, Jupiter has 95 moons. That's a huge number.

But is there any kind of conversation that you have with other space agencies about exploring the moons of Jupiter? Not yet. Because there were experiments to go to asteroids, landing on asteroids.

For example, Japan used to do some of them. Hayabusha and things like that. So those were some of the discussions that we had.

I have so many questions because I have questions about asteroids as well. But I'll actually first ask you a more Mangalyaan related question. So how long is the duration from Earth up till the surface of Mars with where technology stands currently? See the whole, you're talking about the duration of travel?

Yes. The duration of travel is a function of the velocities that you can give to the satellite. We had a very frugal approach to send craft to Mars because we did not have a rocket which was more powerful enough to send. We used only PSLV.

Nobody in the world would have done a mission to Mars with a rocket or their class. So we had to place it around Earth, progressively raise its orbit and increase its velocity and then finally take it to Mars. So it took almost six months to reach there.

So if you have a more powerful rocket, I can put it right away in the very high elliptical orbit so that duration can be substantially reduced. Maybe to make it to three months, but less than that is not feasible. Is it feasible to place human beings within that spacecraft?

In the size of the spacecraft that we described, not possible. We have to design it separately. Okay. Yeah. Again, this is, we're talking about the future.

Yeah, in the future, yes. But realistically speaking, do you think it could be a mission where within six months, the duration of travel is covered? You don't need six months really.

Six months is on account of whatever we did, the type of mission that we did. Possible in three months with a very high rocket capability, propulsion capability, we can travel. But the issue is. If you travel too fast, you will have a very high velocity at the end. You have to reduce the velocity to enter into the orbit of Mars.

For that, you have to kill all the velocity. To kill the velocity, you need to spend again fuel. So it's the whole economy of going traveling is like...

So when you travel in a car, you can apply brake. How to brake a satellite? There is no way to apply brake. So the only way to reduce the speed of a satellite is to reverse it. and fire the engine in the opposite direction.

And that will consume more fuel. So you'll have to carry all the fuel from here up to that point to reduce its speed. So what you do is you find out what is the most optimum speed that will take you up there but don't have too much of velocity reduction. You will end up at the right velocity.

So this is a trick that you have to do by optimization. So the duration plus energy plus quantity of fuel that you need to carry, everything needs to be factored in the calculation. What's the innovations in terms of fuel that are coming up?

Fuel, there is the methane, is one of the beautiful fuels that has emerged. You know, methane, chemical composition is carbon and 4-hydrogen, CH4. So, you know, carbon is there in carbon dioxide. Carbon plus oxygen. Two oxygen, you get carbon dioxide.

And hydrogen plus oxygen is water. So, H2, you pull the hydrogen from water, you take the carbon from carbon dioxide, you get methane. So, what is remaining is oxygen from carbon dioxide and oxygen from water. So if you combine water and carbon dioxide, that means you take your soda water, it is equivalent to methane and oxygen.

Okay. So if you can do this split of water and carbon dioxide into methane and oxygen, you get the fuel and oxidizer. So this is called Sabatier reaction.

And if you can convert this by electrical process, you supply electrical energy, you can make carbon dioxide and water to combine together to produce methane and oxygen. Is this the same kind of fuel that will be used? 30 years.

It's the same fuel used in all the rockets now. We are also developing rockets with methane fuel. But 30 years from now, will it still be?

Even now, the rockets that Elon Musk is flying is with methane. Okay. And we have already started our methane engine development program.

I'm just trying to visualize a reality where we have to explore the moons of Jupiter. Yeah, for that, we already have methane rockets. They are capable of sending crafts to those moons.

Okay. Yeah. But do you think there will ever be a phase where we start using nuclear energy to... Nuclear energy is possible, but this nuclear energy also requires a fuel. It's not nuclear fuel.

Nuclear fuel is used to only generate thermal energy. Right. But rocket requires something to be ejected. So they use hydrogen as a fuel.

So hydrogen, you have to carry hydrogen and then eject, after heating it has to be ejected. So everywhere nuclear powered rockets were developed in the past. In 60s, 70s, development happened. But everybody closed down. But once again, people have started developing in America.

Why did it close down? Because, you know, after the Cold War time, where a lot of work was done, there was a lull period in space. The lull period happened after the moon landing. All such high-end developments came down. And the only focus was on developing space stations.

Mir space station came up in US. International space station came up in America. The space shuttle came. And traveling to moon, Mars, etc. was not a low priority. Everything was on low Earth orbit exploration.

And that did not require any nuclear propulsion. And it was not safe because human beings are operating it. But when you look at long-term human exploration, going far away to other planets, etc., nuclear-fueled rockets are necessary. So that's why there is a new thinking. Going to Mars, then nuclear-fueled rockets will come up.

I remember when I was a kid, there was a show on Star World, which was about the Mars rover. I can't remember if it was Star World or National Geographic. Must have been National Geographic. But I think America, NASA had sent a Mars rover in 2004 or 2000. Perseverance and many others they have sent.

What kind of data was collected by those rovers? And does NASA share that data with other space agencies? Nobody shares data with anyone.

See, these data are exclusive rights of them. But some amount of data is always shared. Especially science mission data. After certain...

lock-in period in every country. After that, they will share. So by that time, most of the science would have already been published.

And many of the classified information they will never give. So this is the nature of the information. So whatever they know about Mars today, everything will not be known to us.

But there are things that America probably knows about Mars that India doesn't right now. Of course they will have. And there are things India knows about the moon that America doesn't. That's a difficult question.

In my opinion, there could be something, yes. Wow. Okay. Have you met the leaders of NASA? Oh, yes.

Yes? Yes. What is the energy in between you guys? They're very keen to work with us.

I'm very happy about it. In fact, I visited headquarters of NASA, administrator. I had even the person administrator, the former administrator, I had a very strong connection.

And because of that such link only we have now enabled the government level also there is a strong link in the cooperating on workspace. President Biden and Prime Minister signed the pact to work on the International Space Station utilization. And after that, both of us, the agency chiefs met and we decided to pursue it. He signed the contract recently and then our astronauts are already undergoing training there now. Gotcha.

There also must be an exchange of technology. There is no exchange of technology because that is not easy in terms of domain of technology. But we will work together on topics of each.

Suppose we have a certain strength, they have a certain strength, we find a way to work together. Presumably, we are working on a satellite called NASA, NASA, NASA, ISRO, Synthetic Apparition Radar. So this is a radar satellite with two radars.

One, we call it L-band radar, working in L-band, and another radar in S-band. So L-band radar is made by them. S-band radar is made by us.

So we both integrated. Gotcha. Then the software was written to use both of them together.

Then the primary satellite was built by us, and we are going to launch. So this is a way of working together. There is no sharing of technology, but sharing of competence to work on a common result. It said that in 2029, there's going to be an asteroid that comes very close to the earth and could be dangerous. And there's also prediction for 2038, I believe.

Parallelly, through the show, I have learned a lot about ancient history and I've learned about how cataclysmic events are a very regular occurrence in our universe. Um, for example, now the world of history is waking up to the fact that perhaps what we are taught in our textbooks is not the accurate beginning of human history. And regularly, after long intervals, the Earth undergoes some cataclysmic events. So the most recent one was something called the Younger Dryas impact, where an asteroid was said to hit the Earth near the Gulf of Mexico. And that reduced the human population so much that it could probably be understood that human civilization had to reboot itself.

So what we learn about the Indus Valley civilization and the Mesopotamian civilization is actually studies about a reboot but perhaps human civilization was much more built out before 12,000 BC which is when roughly the Younger Dryas Impact Theory takes place. But I'm highlighting the Younger Dryas Impact Theory to ask you about asteroids. Because even a small asteroid that's like a kilometer away wide.

That's very dangerous to have a hitting on earth of that size. It's equivalent of being hit by a bullet as a human being. It's a bullet for the earth but a bullet that can destroy humanity.

Is this a conversation that ISRO has to have with NASA to collaborate and to help in fighting off that threat because this is a threat to humankind. This is not only with NASA with all the space agencies. We have different fora where we discuss such topics. It's called near earth objects. NEOs we call, near-Earth objects, which are part of the solar system.

They travel as asteroids. They come occasionally, visit us. They are in highly elliptical orbits, comes out of the asteroid belt sometimes. Due to collision, they travel far away and then come very random paths they choose.

And as you said, there has been many such events in the history of Earth. At least four or five of them are catalogued to have major events, which created total destruction and rebooting, as you said. Another recent one was one in Siberia, I believe.

Siberia didn't hit. It actually passed over the forest and destroyed the lacks of trees. Okay, which created a huge boom and burning of all of that. So this will happen in the history because our time spans are a few hundred years.

We don't even record them. But then it happens in every thousand, few thousands of years. But the point here is that if such an event is going to happen now, we cannot be mute spectators. We should do something. So for this, there are...

where various defense discussions take place in various fora, like UN Coopers and many other international fora. We have forums which will discuss this. And many things have to be done. One, observing and understanding such an event is going to take place. This is the first thing, awareness about it.

Are we able to track such objects using radars and other ground-based observations on a continuous manner? Because these are not easy to detect. They come from anywhere direction. We are not scanning an entire globe around to find out. So if you are not able to predict them, then possibly suddenly they will appear.

In the next 10 years, they are going to hit. What will you do? So this is the first thing.

Then it's prediction trajectory. By locating it, you don't know which direction it is moving. Then you have complex mathematics. The solar system is moving, the Earth is moving, the Sun is moving, and this is also moving. So when it passes Earth and this are going to come closer to each other, this has to be exactly predicted.

If they are a few millions of kilometers away, they will never come. come in contact, even if it passes in the path of Earth. So this is the next part of it.

Third is, if it is actually going to collide, and if you know at least 10 years ahead, 10 years ahead, you have to understand that in 10 years, Earth moves around sun 10 times, and it has to come and meet, and you are able to predict that it is going to hit, then you can take some action. What are the actions today? You can actually deflect it. You can explode it.

You can pulverize it using nuclear bombs, or you can... send a rocket up there, give a little bit of velocity so that it changes its path. So if you give a small velocity there, it will go in millions of kilometers. It will expand in such a manner that it will never ever come near to the Earth. But sometimes if you go wrong in calculation, you are putting a rocket up there will actually bring it closer to Earth if your calculation goes wrong.

So this has to be very carefully done. It seems to me like the practical solution in this case would probably be nuking it. No.

The practical solution is to deflect it because it is moving at tremendous velocity. And if you give very small velocity at some point, it will go millions of kilometers away from Earth. So that is the least energy because if you give an explosion, for example, nuclear explosion, still some parts will come and hit Earth.

There will be still small parts. Sometimes the explosion may not be good enough to pulverize it into small items. Some big boulders may remain.

So you explode. a one kilometer size asteroid. It cuts into two parts, two half a kilometer. What is the use?

Wow. Still it is dangerous. Even if it cuts into 250 meter size, even then it is dangerous.

So there is no point in cutting down to pieces. It is better to deflect without causing much damage. How can one pulverize it? You can't do that. If you have to do that, you have to drill into it, go to the core and explore.

You should go see the movie that showed that, no? Armageddon. Armageddon, yes. In that movie, they were taking drilling machine going to...

So such things you should do. But that's not a practically feasible solution. What about these two points, 2029 and 2038?

No, they are estimated to be going past Earth, not going to impact Earth. They are far away still. But then if your calculation is not correct, if there is a possibility of small error in it, computer truncation error is good enough. it can come and hit you. So you should continuously watch from now on because it has a potential to threaten.

And the whole discussion is go and study them because asteroids come very close to Earth. You send a satellite up there, go observation, collect some samples, bring back to Earth and study the origin of material. So this is what is going on now.

Not as a threat to Earth. Asteroid mining. Yeah. This is another common internet topic. It is like moon mining.

Right. There isn't that much information about it right now. Everybody speaks about it because they think that asteroids are made of gold, platinum, high-value minerals, emeralds.

Okay, possible. But how to bring it to Earth? The complexity of bringing it to Earth makes it extremely costly.

But I'm sure that there will be a technology development over a period of time which will be much more cost-effective. But the challenge is still that it is moving at tremendously high speed. Energy possessed by it is very high. You have to slow down to bring it to Earth.

Still a technical infeasibility. And then if you do it, you make the money which is already present on earth. See, anything which is in surplus will have no value.

You look at gold. Suppose it was available like steel. Will it value this much? You will be making your grills out of gold only if it was that much plenty available.

The rarity makes it precious, no? Right. So let it remain rare. Again, you know what I'm visualizing after a lot of the sections we've covered on this episode? Yeah.

Is the role of AI and robotics. Because I've had conversations with technologists on the show who say that, yes, we're talking about how AI is growing. I'd also love to know if you use chat GPT or... any of these platforms for any of your work?

That's one part of my question. But AI is also progressing, becoming better. It might reach a point of artificial general intelligence where it becomes even more capable. Then there's conjecture about how AGI could possibly help the world of science for humankind.

Like it could help us progress science much faster by getting us faster solutions, by being sort of an assistant to scientists. And then parallelly, robotics is also developing very strongly as a field. So when AGI combines with robotics, I mean, for lack of a better reference point, I want to make people think about science fiction movies with robots, not the negative ones, but the ones where they've shown a positive future for humankind. This is called cyberpunk versus solarpunk. Cyberpunk is a world where you show a dark future, like Black Mirror, the show, and solarpunk is where you show a bright future.

So I think if you approach... technology from a solarpunk perspective and we're able to use robots combined with AGI, a lot of our problems about space exploration might be solved. You said it many a times, I also think about it.

For example, if you want to go to climb Everest, why go to space? If you want to climb Everest, it's not possible for any of us that easily. But if you want to really experience it, what will you do? I am thinking that I will send a robot up there. And what the robot experience, I will experience.

And that is possible tomorrow with all this advent of technology. If the sensory perception of a robot, like the vision, the smell, the touch, and the feel, and the temperature, and the wind flowing on your face, if a robot is feeling, and if I can get the feel into my mind, then I am experiencing the sitting comfort of my room, I can climb the Everest. I can go to the moon. I can go to Mars. So the progress of technology will enable you to experientially know things.

You don't have to be physically available. So this is possible by integrating sensory perception through robots into your neurological system, through brain. I think these are happening now.

So this is one change of technology progress, I believe, which is going to happen. And possible explorations of other planets will be robotic in nature, and humans will never need to go. Then we'll be able to answer questions about mining. Yeah, all that we'll be able to answer because the risks will be much, much lower.

The sending human beings are extremely costly, extremely risky. And the issues of the danger, accidents, all the way will come. But then if you can know experientially without going, actually going there, the whole idea will be different.

In one of your interviews, I think you'd mentioned that sending humans out for missions is much more beneficial than sending a rover, right? No doubt about it. But up to a time when robots are inferior to humans.

But there is a point then robots will become superior to humans. So I am not telling the robots will be, tomorrow's robots will be incapable as a human. It will have the intelligence, it will have the perception, the feel, the behavior. You won't be able to distinguish from a robot and a human.

There will be a time that will come. Based on all the scientists I've spoken to and all the entrepreneurs I've spoken to, who are studying the field of AGI and robotics, I think this is the 2040s, according to me. Would you agree? I agree.

That in the 2040s, we could easily be sending robots. No doubt about it. And robots are doing much better functional capability than a human being. The only thing is that it may not have the, you talk about the making distinction between various emotional aspect of that the human beings are capable of. It may not ever happen.

And it will never have the intelligence of a human being. It will never have. But it will have capabilities.

far superior to human beings. The dexterity, the ability to do things at situations, all these capabilities will be much more superior. Even for an operating robot, you know, robots are much more capable than human beings to connect dissection, cutting, doing threading, everything. It can do it much better than a human being. So they are already becoming better.

But it may not replace human beings. The human beings have to be in the back end to do the work by the robot. Controlling it from earth? Controlling it, yes. Are we able to send signals that far?

Signals will always travel at electromagnetic speeds. So that distance doesn't matter. Now as I mentioned about light travels forever.

Every signal also will travel forever, but it will expand in the sphere. It is like the source of light will expand like a sphere. Its intensity will come down, but it will travel forever.

I saw a YouTube video some time ago. It was about the size of the known universe. And they show this massive circle to represent the whole size of the universe.

But then they also show a small globe on that. And they say that this is where the furthest electromagnetic signal from Earth has possibly reached. Reached yet. And that's maybe not even like... 2% of the whole universe.

Right? I mean, I might be getting the numbers wrong. It is true because the whole universe was created 13.8 billion years back.

The earth came only a few billion years back. So you can count only from that point. Okay.

Robots, asteroid. AI. We were talking about AI quite a bit.

I think we didn't speak much about it. How is ISRO using AI today? AI has come into every... every part of life now it's ai is then your mobile phones object notifications speech synthesis huge data handling i think all of these are ai really so in this row we are working on ai within very many areas for example one of the very evident area is image processing satellites take images our earth observation satellite continuously images are taken and images are sent back to earth and on ground that the computers analyze and then convert into useful products But if AI can be applied on these images, we can do many more things. For example, if you take an image, you will find it will contain trees, contain roads, people, cars, so many objects.

And if this can be identified by the computer by itself and say this is a car, and this is called object identification. This is one of the easiest way that AI can work on an image. And if you are, suppose you are doing a satellite for espionage.

for example you want to do surveillance and you want to look at only a troop movement nothing else you are interested you are not interested in the terrain or anything you are interested in troop movement and the satellite will be equipped by an a engine to look at only for troops it can identify human it can identify tanks it can identify vessels or any ships or aircrafts and then give a warning to the downline without even image downloading then it will improve the throughput and it can continuously do this with assume there are And also such satellites, then entire area can be survived. Every person's movement can be tagged. And you can look for it, what is happening. You can do for animals. You can do for your fright movement.

You can look for agriculture. You can use it for healthcare. So this is one of the use that we are trying to use, how AI can be used. We use it on rockets for analyzing its data on board and decide whether the rocket is performing very well. Use AI engine.

to check whether everything is working well. If there is some fault seen, how to correct it, switch over to something else or destroy the rocket in case it is not worth to continue or abort the mission when crew is traveling so the crew can be saved. So this is another idea.

Have you developed your own AI? We are all developing our own. Wow.

We have many teams working across this room developing all this. Wow. One of the capable hardware is going to fly soon. And such what I mentioned is already going to be launched.

We are developing ground already. AI is used in non-destructive evaluation. You know, non-destructive evaluation is x-ray.

You know, your chest x-ray? Right, right. Your chest x-ray, what the doctors, after chest x-ray, you look at it. Oh, your chest has this problem, that problem. You have 2B.

Can you detect it? Similarly, we take x-rays of rockets. Hundreds and hundreds of x-rays are taken for every rocket, for various hardwares. And these x-rays look for defects in hardware, materials, manufacturing, etc.

And we look at it and screen it. And this... These are screened through the skill of the people. But if an AI engine, if you feed these x-rays into an AI engine, it will analyze and tell you in no time there are defects or no defects. So this is another technique.

Recently I came to know that if you supply your checks to x-ray, your TB, whether it is there or not, can be detected. Then an AI tool will tell you whether you have TB. It's not an easy thing. By comparing lakhs of results of patients, this AI tool has been developed.

So it's such a beautiful thing. You know, I think you mentioned it in this conversation itself, that in the last 100 years, technology has just exploded in terms of progress. So I'm very curious to see what happens over the next 100 years. Whenever we speak to a military person or a geopolitical observer, they always mention space warfare nowadays.

Apparently, there are reports that Russia is building some kind of nuclear missile, which is capable of taking out satellites. And when it comes to the military, the one thing I've learned is that wars are won or lost based on logistical capabilities. Now, that got me thinking about the modern day and modern day warfare. The only way we can understand modern day warfare is by seeing what's happening in our earth right now itself. There's been an element of cyber, there's been an element of drone warfare already.

That really got me thinking about the role of satellites with respect to drones, with respect to cyber warfare. Satellites are... probably a very very key part of wars nowadays.

They're part of peacekeeping nowadays. Not wars. They are not meant to create wars, but to prevent wars, I will say like that. Because the awareness of the situation is very important. Once you know that you are being observed, you are being tracked, you are being looked at, the adversaries will have hesitation to cause troubles for you.

So satellites can do many things. It can observe situations, as I mentioned. It can track the borders.

It can look at the troop movements and give a communication. It can help weapon delivery. So once you have a strength of having satellites to support all of this, then you have the natural strength to prevent any adversaries to take advantage. So that's a positive part of it. There's a little tiny part of me that feels like ISRO has some very, very important projects that are kept secret away from the public eye for good reason, which are possibly even bigger than...

what is revealed publicly like the Chandrayaan-3. But this is for the sake of our great nation security. I think you should believe that and continue.

Okay. Have you ever interacted with the Chinese Space Agency? Yeah, of course. So we meet, generally there are international agencies where we meet, like International Astronautical Federation where the scientific people from China and other...

Nations also come and meet. Do they share any data information? Nobody shares any data with others, no. Unless it is for certain specific domains. For example, we share Earth observation data even with Chinese.

Chinese share their data with us. So we have a BRICS consortia where we put our satellite data into one common platform. And all BRICS nations share each other. So there are such mechanisms in place.

But in terms of technology, what are developed there, nobody will share. Okay, I have a dear friend. His name is Balaji Srinivasan. He is one of the leaders of tech in he's from Silicon Valley originally, but now tech is also global.

So he showed me a video of our first flying cars that have actually been developed in China. It's basically big drones. Yeah, they are nothing but drones. Yeah, like they've taken drone technology and just made it big. But flying cars have finally become a reality.

You know, we grew up dreaming of that reality. There used to be a cartoon called the Jetsons way back. I don't know if you remember this.

Men fly. Aircrafts are flying. Why cars cannot fly? Exactly.

I mean, that was the question we all had as kids. But I guess this drone technology being developed now in the 2020s has led to the first actual flying car, which is capable of carrying human beings around. I also believe it is automated, if I'm not mistaken. No, they are automated.

Manual, both are there. Piloted are also there. They're not in the form of cars.

They're mostly in the form of drones with the one or two seater, multi-seater. Does ISRO develop drone technology as well? We don't work on drones, but we make use of drones for many things. But drone-based such as scooters or other mobility is all developed in IATs. There are startups who are working on it.

Okay. Are you actively working with a lot of space tech startups? Yes, a lot of them. Okay.

Yeah. You're happy with what's happening in the Indian? Extremely happy because in the last few years, we could have seen almost 200 plus startups have come up in space sector, which was only one maybe in 10 years back. Can you name some key ones that everyone should know about? Many I can name.

Suppose you look at rocket building startups. The one which comes to mind is Skyroot and Agnikul. Both are really doing well. And both of them have done their first step launches from Sadiq Sahib Space Center.

And both are developing small satellite launch vehicles. And all expecting in a year or so they will be ready for their launch. There is another company called EtherX Space who is developing a reusable rocket.

Then on the satellite side, there are many. Pixel is one. Then Druva, Space.

Then application side, there are like Satsua, Vasundhara, then MapMyIndia and many others who have developed and made use of the satellite area. Why is the growth of this ecosystem important for ISRO? It is important for the nation.

Why I say it's important for ISRO? Because the space... is such that it has a great economic potential, which we have not explored till now. See, all the time we have been talking about technology, going to moon, Mars, and things like that.

But ultimately, it has to provide an economic activity to the nation, to give job, employment, ultimately revenue to the nation to sustain on itself. So, we know space can produce a lot of business. For example, so? For example, communication, for example. All the satellite communication is still satellite-based.

But then... You have terrestrial complementing it. So the satellite communication still continues to be very important. And you are now going to have direct-to-device communication from the Leo constellation you are aware of.

Starlink, OneWeb are examples of it. So this is one commercial activity. Second is all the Earth observation satellite data. That comes out.

It's again a commercial product. Based on that, there are a lot of industries working on it. Mapping, geospatial services, natural resource mapping. Then governmental projects like the roads and infrastructure development, fisheries, climate and weather models and climate satellites and climate advisories for various activities, strategic users.

Your GPS services, P&D services, position navigation, timing services. All these are commercial services. And to support it, you have another set of commercial services called establishing, communication networks, antenna systems, commanding and telecommanding, and data processing networks, computers, chains.

That economy is 70% of the size. So if you look at the global space economy, it is $400 billion annually. $400 billion.

And our contribution is very small. It's only 2%. Indian contribution.

Perhaps it's going to change. Our goal is to increase it maybe fivefold in the coming 10 years. That's our plan.

To make it happen is not only ISRO. We need many other people to come. Otherwise, ISRO will continue to work on government grants. No, that's not going to make it scale up. We need industries who will work in all these sectors.

Industries who will build rockets. Industries who will build satellites. Industries who will build antennas, ground stations, ground equipments, providing services. And all of this together will...

increases the scale of operation. And ISRO will get more launch opportunities. Somebody builds hundreds of satellites in India, ISRO can launch them. So that will be a scaling of the activity. I'm visualizing that the next generation of ISRO employees will be a much larger number of people.

Space employees. Space employees. But okay, specifically when you're hiring at ISRO or when you're promoting people at ISRO? Promoting people for doing space activities.

So if suppose I think of a Boeing coming up in India, a company of that nature, why not? When you're hiring people at ISRO and when you are promoting a certain teammate, what are the traits you look for in that person? How does someone climb up the ladder in ISRO career-wise? Two, three qualities.

First, competence in terms of academic excellence, knowledge. But he may not know everything, not necessary. But he has a passion to learn. Very difficult to judge, very difficult to gauge, but with some questions we'll be able to understand. Second, ability to work as a team.

Even if he's brilliant, if he's a loner, it's of no use. He must be able to understand others, respect others, work with others, and then deliver as a team. Lastly, leadership quality.

Everybody will not be a leader, that I understand. But out of the many we recruit, there will be some leaders. Those traits are very special traits. It doesn't come by recruitment, it comes through training and through proper mentorship.

So if you have some aspect of that dedication, capability we see, we mentor them on a continuous basis to make them leaders. Gotcha. I think we're almost at the end of the episode. Yeah. We've been speaking for a while.

Ah, this is our National Space Day special. How does it feel that the team which worked with you, the team you were a part of, has now created an event for the whole country? Special feeling for you? I'm happy that we are a team that can always do such wonders. I'm banking on them to do that.

Okay, how do you feel? I'm expecting a wonderful event on 23rd. August, the Honorable President will be there to inaugurate this function. But this is not going to be one event this year.

It's going to be an annual event. And just not one day event. It's a period, the whole of August, we are making sure that we connect with the society, students, science community, ministries, departments, industries, startups, everybody, so as to create the vibrancy, the energy, the enthusiasm of the success that we have in Chandrayaanthi. What message do you have for the public, sir?

Like what is ISRO's message to the Indian audiences? Because our whole country loves you. Like the moment someone even says the name ISRO, there's a sense of respect and pride that every Indian feels. So even on my way to the headquarters here today, when I told the hotel staff, when I was telling the airline staff that I'm going to ISRO, people were happy for me that I'm getting a chance to come.

That is how the country looks at this organization. What's your message to the country? It's a fantastic feeling.

It's a pride for all of us. This has come out of the hard work of the... entire community with the support of the government. So the inspiration element is very, very important.

It gives belief in yourself, a certain sort of confidence to the young people. Whenever I go to some schools in a village or some places, I always find someone coming and say, I want to join ISRO, I want to come and become an astronaut, I want to do something for the country. They write mails and letters, more than this type of fact. I find that the desire of many people to come and work for the country is really fantastic. And this is the change that has happened.

Earlier, nobody knew about it. Now, after Chandrayaanathri, the awareness is very high. Though we have been silently working, the awareness is very important. The awareness is too important, one, for themselves, because it puts them on a higher pedestal, on a higher level of confidence to expect. Second is, it also gives us a responsibility to envision bigger.

So it's a... win-win situation for ISRO and for the public. Okay.

Just want to say it was the honor of my life to get some time with you, sir. Thank you. I can't tell you how happy and grateful my whole team is for you today. I've been stopping myself from fanboying over you throughout the course of this podcast.

But just thank you very much, sir. There's been 800 podcasts we've created. It's been a nine-year journey for me.

And there were only two days that my mother said she was proud of me. This was one of the days. So, just genuinely, thank you, sir. It means a lot that you gave us your time. I saluted you at the beginning.

I'll salute you at the end. Thank you for everything you've done for our country, sir. Genuinely, from our heart, a whole generation is very grateful to all of you.

Thank you for the support and the blessings. We are going for a launch on 16th, just after the Independence Day celebration. That's the launch of SSLV D3. It is the third development flight.

So your blessings needed for a launch. And all for all the launches that are going to be this year. All the positive energy, sir, from the whole country.

Thank you. So just thank you for everything. Really, when, you know, foreign podcasts and all talk about ISRO, it's a sense of pride for all of us using social media within India.

I think there's a whole generation of space enthusiasts. that wants to take this journey even forward because of all the work and hours that all of you have put in. So thank you, sir. Thank you once again.

Thank you. That was the episode for today. Ladies and gentlemen, honestly, I was only prepared for this episode because of our countless conversations with astrophysicists, specifically Abhijit Chavadasa, who has spoken about space to me so many times on the show. These were all the questions that had formed in my head over the last five years. Space.

And space tech are domains that interest me very much. And it genuinely can't get bigger and better than Dr. S. Somnath being on the Ranveer show. Very big career day for me and possibly the biggest podcast of the year for me.

So thank you to sir. I hope he returns on TRS very soon because there's a lot more to discuss with Dr. Somnath. But until next time guys from Ranveer and the team, let's keep celebrating ISRO. Let's wish everyone a happy National Space Day. And...

Until next time, from Ranveer and the team, Jai Hind and we'll see you soon.