Brett Daniel Shehadey
Special Contributor for In Homeland Security
India is scheduled to launch a 350 ton rocket hauling an orbiter to Mars on November 5. If successful, they will trail behind the US, Russia and the EU and beat China and Japan in the Mars excursion.
“Orbiting Mars itself is a challenge,” said Indian Space Research Organization Chairman K Radhakrishnan. “This is our first interplanetary mission.”
The head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, said in 2011, “[Mars] is a planet that does not like earthlings. Only 30 per cent of Soviet-Russian launches to Mars were successful, the Americans have had 50 per cent success…”
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is hoping to do better than its big neighbors. Aside from national rivalry and technological superiority, if India succeeds in two day’s time, they will have a greater internal national prestige and confidence. Moreover, the intended trickle-down advances in space technology are expected, as they have helped the Western states like the US. These are especially critical and are used to justify any space program in one of the world’s poorest democracies.
The European Space Agency is in second place. They plan to launch their land rover ExoMars between 2016 and 2018. The Russian Federation’s Roscosmos joined the mission last June.
The US offers no contest with orbiters, however, and has achived extraterrestrial landings of multiple rovers on the Red Planet (recently- Opportunity, Spirit and Curiosity). The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) plans to send astronauts there by a 2030 timeframe.
NASA will help India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) in a limited capacity, which may give them a large boost over China. They will provide communications and navigation support.
In early October, China officially criticized US “discriminatory” policy that forbids assisting its civilian space agency (China National Space Agency). The US currently has a ban since 2011 on aiding Chinese space programs because less because of its strategic competitor status and more because of its espionage and easily converted military application.
The law also bans the US from hosting Chinese nationals at US space facilities. Last month, NASA announced that Chinese nationals would not be allowed inside the Second Kepler Science Conference on exoplanets.
At the other extreme, the US is helping other states. China continues to miss out but refuses to give anything in return. China’s foreign policy aimed at the US has thus far been one of take more than you give (e.g. trade imbalance).
This has placed China on team Russia. Yet their joint space endeavors to mars have not been fruitful. Phobos-Grunt and the Yinghuo-1 failed to ignite the engines to put it on a heading to mars after a successful launch. Russian officials said that it was stuck in Earth’s orbit. This was November 9, 2011. By 2012 it burned up over the Pacific Ocean.
A retired Russian General-Lieutenant Nikolay Rodionov, who ran the Federation’s ballistic missile early warning system, blamed US long-range radio stations in Alaska. The US High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is accused by many conspiracy buffs around the world and especially Russia as some type of weapon that disrupts the ionosphere. The Phobos-Grunt revealed that it was still receiving telemetry and in communication before the malfunction. A Phobos-Grunt II mission to mars is planned by 2022.
It will be interesting to see if the US backed Indian mission will work where the Russian backed Chinese mission to mars failed and propel India and Japan’s space program ahead of China’s. The eventual goal should be a greater cooperation with Russia and China in civilian space programs and operations. The trick is rightly separating the American space defense applications from the civilian, and only jointly operating with other nations with the latter. If the US can do that, space diplomacy will be relevant again and may buy it larger gains in the Pacific and with Russia and or China in general- who are both very interested in teaming up with team USA, in spite of their alliance of necessity.
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