India’s Road Less Travelled: Does the Moon Smell Like Cheese, Soy or Curry?
Think of it.
There is now a fourth nation within our swelling species that has engineered a device which has touched the surface of the Moon. “Our Moon,” as we call it, possessive creatures that we are.
We always have felt the lunar landscape with our imaginations and now we are able to touch it – literally. Science and data, children of the same father, compound and push us forward. They revealed that we can even touch the Moon with our bare hand. Based on measurements of the lunar soil, we know we can press a bare hand against the hottest lunar soil without feeling uncomfortably warm.
India’s new national lunar flagship, Chandrayaan, had no human hand with which to reach out to feel the love. However human hands and brains engineered its landing approximately 69 degrees south latitude at a landing site called “Shiva Shakti,” words that symbolize the strength of the women who contributed to this mission, according to its Prime Minister.
The landing was closer to the lunar South Pole than any craft before. As the current resident of the USA White House would say, “That’s a big deal, folks!”
And a great adventure. Great adventures are lubricants that trigger the imagination and feed the memory of prior inspirations.
Great Adventures of the Past and Present
India’s great adventure landed me back to July 1969 and the American lunar mission on the night when it transfixed the world. As a young boy in Upstate New York, it did what I am sure India’s majestic moment has done to young boys and girls in Chennai, Pune and Delhi.
Swollen with national pride, I recall that mind-altering night. As luck – or divine intervention – would have it, three Catholic priests showed up at our home for dinner to watch Neil and Buzz.
The three were very different people. A mixture of saintliness, intellectual skepticism and petty nastiness.
Father Neil (real name, coincidentally) was a saint. A 1960’s style guy with a heart wide as space and with an almost unearthly sense of compassion. He ran a house of mercy for the most down-trodden addicts and impoverished in the City of Rochester. Forever gentle, his wish was that this unifying moment would usher in lasting peace among people.
Father Jim was a bright guy. Intellectually brilliant, well read and too keen a social observer for his own good as he looked over the rocky landscape of that troubled era in the world. He soon after had a crisis of faith. He watched the Moon landing and could not come to any other conclusion than that this was the beginning of the end for the mythologies and cultures we knew. He left the priesthood and became a successful CFO of a company in New York. Ironically, he married an ex-nun! You can take the boy out of the country, but . . .
Father Richard was a jerk. He was a cynical, petty human being who was suspect on many levels. It would have been best to have him sent beyond the Moon. A perfect example of a zombie satellite. He was sarcastic and caustic about the entire episode and wanted only to gossip about his own parishioners – his flock – in the most horrid way.
What Does the Moon Smell Like?
I was enthralled by the TV and wondering all kinds of things. What the Moon smelled like for instance. (Later on, the Apollo astronauts were quite specific. Moondust smells like burnt gunpowder.) My string of questions never ceased. Maybe that was the start of my podcasting career.
I turned to Father Neil at the end of the night for some wisdom. The man who would marry me, bury my father and, before his own death, serve as my spiritual advisor said in his quiet way, “We are going to need to change if we are going to live peacefully there.”
While Neil remains my inspiration, I was more like Father Jim. I didn’t see much hope, but I know more now. I remain optimistic.
What I do know is that, through the SSPI India chapter and the great effort by Jay Gullish of the US-India Business Council, we have seen an explosion of entrepreneurial activity and policy development in India. It is that nation’s time. That is clear. We are pleased that the India Space Association and others are part of our regular monthly working group.
This is a new moment for a nation where many of the world’s great creative technical minds and genuine saints were born, taught and wander. I wonder if that ancient DNA and the new one, launched on the back of ISRO, will balance its progress with Father Neil’s and Neil Armstrong’s single great aspiration: a giant leap.
Join us for the upcoming New York Space Business Roundtable on the third Wednesday of the month. Visit: www.sspi.org/events.