As India gears up for the launch of Chandrayaan 3, here's a throwback to 2021 when the determined ISRO chief, S Somnath, spoke about the prospect of a soft landing on the moon.
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00:00Let me be a little rude and say, but could our frugal approach have partly explained
00:07the well-publicized failure of the Chandrayaan moon landing?
00:10I think it has nothing to do with the approaches of engineering.
00:13We may fail. Again, there is no guarantee of success in any rocket mission.
00:18Why is it worth doing?
00:19Rockets are the only means by which human beings can ever travel the shores of the earth to another planet.
00:30Let me be a little rude and say, but could our
00:59frugal approach have partly explained the well-publicized failure of the Chandrayaan
01:05moon landing and the way in which the land rover crashed?
01:08Absolutely not. I think it has nothing to do with the approaches of engineering.
01:13Approaches of engineering is one and problems and issues in a mission are another.
01:19See, we must realize that space technology is a very unpardoning technology.
01:23Just the case of an aircraft which you are designing, assume that I am designing a
01:27transport aircraft before it actually flies with passengers.
01:29It would have gone through hundreds of tests in the ground.
01:32For a mission to Chandrayaan or Mars, we will never ever get a chance to launch it in a
01:37test flight and then say the landing is perfect.
01:40For in the case of Chandrayaan 2, we did actually simulated lot of landing exercise in earth.
01:46But they were all successful.
01:48But the moment that we go to moon, there is yet another problem that we have a low gravity
01:52compared to earth. You cannot create a low gravity field in earth.
01:55Are we going to try again?
01:56We are going to try again because we understood there are parameters beyond what we actually
02:01done the simulation in ground.
02:03We need to go further.
02:04For that, we are making a lot of simulation testbeds.
02:07We are also making sensors, basically looking at where you are, more redundant systems,
02:13new technologies which we have not put last time.
02:15All this will come into the new lander and with the knowledge and confidence, we have
02:19to go ahead.
02:20We may fail again.
02:22I want to tell you that there is no guarantee of success in any rocket mission.
02:26But why is it worth doing?
02:28Why is it worth doing?
02:28Because it is worth doing this, we are doing it.
02:31See, we must realize that the high-tech engineering activities of this nature, why human beings
02:37do?
02:38It is because it is challenging and it is also because it is the only way that human
02:43beings can explore.
02:44I tell my young engineers, why we do you work on rockets?
02:47Not because that it puts some satellite up there.
02:49Rockets are the only means by which human beings can ever travel the shores of the earth
02:53to another planet.
02:55There is no other way.