Rockets in the News: Rocket Disaster Casts Doubt Over Indian Space Program

Yahoo News: Rocket Disaster Casts Doubt Over Indian Space Program
If the history of modern rocketry teaches anything, it's that sooner or later, stuff will blow up. When you pour thousands of gallons of combustible fuel into 15-story machines and then ignite the whole stack, the occasional explosion is simply going to be the cost of doing business. What you have to hope is that no one gets hurt, and if at all possible, no one's watching.

The spectacular Christmas-day explosion of India's new Geo-Synchronous Launch Vehicle (GSLV) - a gleaming 167-ft. (51m) tower of rocket - spared the country the deaths that sometimes accompany space disasters, but the public humiliation was another matter. Crowds swarmed the Satish Sahwan Space Center in Andhra Pradesh in anticipation of the launch and millions more watched live on TV as the GSLV's engines were lit at 4:04 PM. Forty-seven seconds later, engineers on the ground lost control of the vehicle. Sixteen seconds after that, they blew the haywire rocket up. A booster that was supposed to carry a critical telecommunications satellite into high-Earth orbit instead met its end just eight miles (13 km) over the Bay of Bengal. (See the top 50 space moments since Sputnik.)

More was lost in the GSLV disaster than a $39 million (1.75 billion rupee) rocket and its satellite payload. Also badly damaged was India's long-pursued rep as a major player in the commercial rocket game. This is not the first GSLV that has failed to fly; the booster has a record of four disasters in seven tries over the past 10 years - the most recent just last April.

"The GSLV has had only a 50% success rate," says Ajey Lele, space expert at the Institute of Defense and Security Analysis in New Delhi. "India has wanted to have the technology and the facility [to launch heavy payloads] on its own soil. Now that will not happen in the near future." But with China, Japan, the U.S. and other countries all chasing the same global business with their own fleet of rockets, the near future may be all the time the Indian program has. See pictures of five nations' space programs.

India has had a big - if unheralded - presence in the space community for a long time. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) - essentially India's NASA - was established in 1969 with the mission of focusing exclusively on launching communications and Earth observation satellites, programs that have immediate benefits for people on the ground and were seen as the only legitimate business a country as poor as India had in space.

ISRO did well with its limited portfolio, but things changed in 1999, when the country - puffed up after a series of successful nuclear tests the year before - decided to aim higher, planning for unmanned missions to the moon and manned missions into Earth orbit. In 2008, the Chandrayaan-1 lunar spacecraft made good on part of that promise, not only successfully orbiting the moon, but making a significant - indeed, landmark - discovery about the surprising quantity of water mixed in with the lunar soil. Meantime, the smaller predecessor of the GSLV was making a name for itself as a reliable commercial launcher, with a string of 16 successful launches against no failures. The GSLV was seen as the next logical step in a rapidly advancing program: a three-stage, heavy-lift rocket suitable for bigger payloads and crews. (See photos of the labor of space exploration.)

But the ambitious design of the rocket may be its undoing. The problem that led to the explosion occurred in the first stage - a giant liquid-fueled engine surrounded by four, strap-on solid fuel rockets. Strap-ons, as designers know, are a great way to add oomph to a booster; the more power you need, the more solids you attach. But multiple engines mean increased complexity - not to mention the need to coordinate the exact amount of thrust each motor is producing, the exact moment ignition takes place and the tricky acoustical business of controlling vibrations. The fact that it's that stage that failed this time was not surprising but it was disappointing, since in the April launch it worked perfectly; it was the second, simpler stage that failed that time. Another former ISRO chief called the nature of this most recent accident nothing short of "a national setback."

For the moment it's unclear whether it's a setback the space agency can recover from in time. Sorting out multiple glitches in multiple stages is a time-consuming business, and even one more failure could irreparably destroy the GSLV's image. Ultimately, the global market for heavy-lift flight could simply leave India behind. Uncertain too will be the scheduled 2015 launch of the Chandrayaan II, a joint Indian-Russian moon mission that's intended to carry both a lunar satellite and a rover and was slated to be launched on a GSLV. Even less certain is the launch of the first Indian astronauts - or vyomanauts - a mission that did not yet even have a target date and is less likely than ever to get one until the big booster proves itself.

India's economic and technological growth have been extraordinary over the past ten years, but as the U.S. and Russia learned over the previous fifty, there is nothing that challenges a country's scientific and industrial base like trying to take those first steps into space. The GSLV may yet recover, and vyomanauts may yet ride it to glory, but the path won't be easy. It never, ever is.

Somnium, by Johannes Kepler

Somnium (Latin for "The Dream") is a fantasy written between 1620 and 1630, in Latin, by Johannes Kepler. In the narrative, a student of Tycho Brahe is transported to the Moon by occult forces. It presents a detailed imaginative description of how the earth might look when viewed from the moon, and is considered the first serious scientific treatise on lunar astronomy.

Somnium began as a student dissertation in which Kepler defended the Copernican doctrine of the motion of the Earth, suggesting that an observer on the Moon would find the planet's movements as clearly visible as the Moon's activity is to the Earth's inhabitants. Nearly 20 years later, Kepler added the dream framework, and after another decade, he drafted a series of explanatory notes reflecting upon his turbulent career and the stages of his intellectual development. The book was edited by his heirs, including Jacob Bartsch, after Kepler's death in 1630. It was published posthumously in 1634 by his son, Ludwig Kepler. Similarities with real life led to Kepler's own mother being arrested on charges of witchcraft.

The story is the tale of Duracotus, who was the son of an Icelandic witch named Fiolxhilda. During his youth she banished Duracotus to Denmark for five years. Upon his return, she decided to share some of her secrets with him. She explained that her instructor had been a demon who dwelt on the Moon. During a Solar Eclipse, the lunar demons were able to travel between the Earth and the Moon via a bridge of darkness. The son decided he wanted to make this journey, and so he was transported to the Moon by demons.

To ease his journey he was given a drowsing draught and moist sponges to hold under his nose. He was carried to the point of neutral gravity between the Earth and Moon, then allowed to drift down to the lunar surface. Thus the author understood some of the effects of gravity and the need for environmental protection above the atmosphere.

Modern Day
Fresh Aire V by the Mannheim Steamroller is a concept album based on the work.

The Power of the Church
Why did it take over 1600 years between the publication of A True Story and Somnium? Well, the church didn't like stories that postulated that there might be life on other planets. Nor did they like the fact that some people thought that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the sun and other "wanderers" (aka planets) revolving around the Earth. It was therefore not particularly safe to publish such stories until the church lost a little bit (but only a little bit) of its grip on the mind of man.

Vera History, by Lukian/Lucian of Samosata

A 17th century fictional portrait of Lucian of Samosata.

Mankind has always dreamed of travelling to the Moon, and of travellers from outer space visiting Earth.

The first known story is Vera Historia ("True History" or "A True Story") written by a Syrian, Lukian/Lucian (in a variety of Greek dialects). It was written about AD 180, and describes a voyage to the moon by a ship, which is lifted to the surface of the moon with the aid of a giant whirlwind. [This story is therefore fantasy rather than science fiction, since the main characters do not reach outer space by any kind of mechanical means. Nevertheless, it shows mankind's fascination with space, and its generally accepted belief that there were inhabited worlds besides Earth.

This story is available for free on the Kindle (as is all Lucian's works) or at Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10430/pg10430.txt) as a text file.

Lucian of Samosata
Lucian of Samosata (Latin: Lucianus Samosatensis; c. A.D. 125 – after A.D. 180) was an Assyrian rhetorician, and satirist who wrote in the Greek language.

Few details of Lucian's life are known. He claimed to have been born in Samosata, in the former kingdom of Commagene, which had been absorbed by the Roman Empire and made part of the province of Syria.

In his works, Lucian refers to himself as a "Syrian", "Assyrian" and "barbarian", perhaps indicating "he was from the Semitic and not the imported Greek population" of Samosata.

Lucian almost certainly did not write all of the more than eighty works that have been attributed to him: declamations, essays both laudatory and sarcastic, satiric epigrams, and comic dialogues and symposia with a satirical cast, studded with quotations in alarming contexts and allusions set in an unusual light, designed to be surprising and provocative.

His name added luster to any entertaining and sarcastic essay: over 150 surviving manuscripts attest to his continued popularity. The first printed edition of a selection of his works was issued at Florence in 1499. His best known works are A True Story (a romance, not "true" at all, which he admits in his introduction to the story), Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the Dead.

Lucian was trained as a rhetorician, a vocation where one pleads in court, composing pleas for others, and teaching the art of pleading. Lucian's practice was to travel about, giving amusing discourses and witty lectures improvised on the spot. He travelled through Ionia and mainland Greece, to Italy and even to Gaul, and became not only famous but also wealthy.

Works
Lucian was one of the first novelists in western civilization. In A True Story, a fictional narrative work written in prose, he parodied some fantastic tales told by Homer in the Odyssey and some feeble fantasies that were popular in his time. He anticipated modern fictional themes like voyages to the moon and Venus, extraterrestrial life and wars between planets, more than a millennium before Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. His novel is widely regarded as an early, if not the earliest science fiction work.

Lucian also wrote a satire called The Passing of Peregrinus, in which the lead character, Peregrinus Proteus, takes advantage of the generosity and gullibility of Christians. This is one of the earliest surviving pagan perceptions of Christianity. His Philopseudes ("Lover of Lies or Cheater") is a frame story which includes the original version of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice".

Language
Lucian wrote in the Attic dialect "with a facility almost equal to [that of] Plato." He was able to imitate Herodotus's [Greek historian] Ionic dialect so successfully in his work "The Syrian Goddess" that some scholars refuse to recognize him as the author.

The Plot of A True Story

In True History, Lucian and a company of adventuring heroes sailing westward through the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar) are blown off course by a strong wind, and after 79 days come to an island. This island is home to a river of wine filled with fish, and bears a marker indicating that Heracles and Dionysos have traveled to this point, along with normal footprints and giant footprints.

Shortly after leaving the island, they are lifted up by a giant waterspout and deposited on the Moon on the eighth day. There they find themselves embroiled in a full-scale war between the king of the Moon and the king of the Sun over colonisation of the Morning Star, involving armies which boast such exotica as stalk-and-mushroom men, acorn-dogs ("dog-faced men fighting on winged acorns"), and cloud-centaurs. Unusually, the Sun, Moon, stars and planets are portrayed as locales, each with its unique geographic details and inhabitants. The War is finally won by the Sun's armies clouding the moon over. Details of the moon follows, there are no women, and children grow inside the calf of men.

After returning to the Earth, the adventurers become trapped in a giant whale; inside the 200-mile-long animal, there live many groups of people whom they rout in war. They also reach a sea of milk, an island of cheese and the isle of the blessed. There, he meets the heroes of the Trojan War, other mythical men and animals, and even Homer. They find Herodotus being eternally punished for the "lies" he published in his Histories.

After leaving the Island of the Blessed, they deliver a letter to Calypso given to them by Odysseus explaining that he wishes he had stayed with her so he could have lived eternally. They then discover a chasm in the Ocean, but eventually sail around it, discover a far-off continent and decide to explore it. The book ends rather abruptly by Lucian saying that their adventure there will be the subject of following books.

Manifesto

This blog is dedicated to the history of rocket travel, from the dreams of the ancient to the present day. We'll present biographies of rocket scientists, biographies of actual rockets, and news of the past, present and future devoted to rocketry.