There was an intriguing outpouring of concern worldwide when Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore returned to Earth after 280-something days in space. People were particularly concerned about Williams’s health and how she was doing, as if Wilmore hadn’t been there with her living through the same mission.

Researchers are still studying the effects of prolonged spaceflight on human bodies and don’t yet have enough data to say with confidence that some effects are more pronounced in women’s bodies. More than a few astronauts have also flown longer missions. NASA also has exercise and medical check-up regimens in place for astronauts to follow during long-duration missions as well as once they return to the ground. Taken together, while the mission profile was unusual, the duo didn’t present NASA with challenges it didn’t already know how to address.

Williams likely received the attention she did because she is more popular and, in some parts of the world, for her Indian ancestry. Other than her being a veteran astronaut, a NASA scientist, and a good ambassador for human spaceflight, I don’t think she’s special in a way that could justify the world’s, including India’s, tunnel vision.

In fact, while there was considerable interest in the astronauts’ well-being onboard the International Space Station (ISS) after their original mission profile had been stretched from eight days to nine months, the world has a much better case study to focus on now — yet few seem bothered.

On April 20 (IST), Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut Donald “Don” Pettit returned from the ISS onboard a Soyuz capsule on its MS-26 mission. Of them, Pettit turned 70 years old on April 20. He is NASA’s oldest active astronaut. His most recent ISS expedition lasted 220 days and so far he has accumulated 590 days in space.

When the Soyuz MS-26 capsule touched down in Kazakhstan, NASA tweeted:

Here’s the April 16 interview, where you can also listen to him talking about what the first thing he’s likely to do once he lands: poop. “It affects different people different ways,” he goes on to say about long space stays. “Some people can land and go out, eat pizza, and dance. When I land, it takes me about 24 hours to feel like I’m a human being again.”

According to Russian journalist (and a good source of spaceflight details coming out of that country) Anatoly Zak, Pettit didn’t look good coming out of the Soyuz capsule.

That cameras at the landing were asked to point away from Pettit because he was in “bad shape” is so wholesome. Jonathan McDowell put it in terms we’d understand:

Right now, Williams, Wilmore, and Pettit will be going through NASA’s physical and mental rehabilitation programme for astronauts wrapping up long-term missions (as defined by NASA’s Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer). It will last for at least 45 days and will be extended if an astronaut needs more help.

Once the rehabilitation is done, it will be good to hear from Williams, Wilmore, and Pettit about their missions. I do hope they will speak up and NASA will allow them to be candid.

A few weeks ago, Ars Technica published an article based on an intimate interview with Barry Wilmore. Both the fact of the article being published and the details that populated it were evidence of good journalism. But I’d rather astronauts who have been on such high-profile missions share all the details they’re allowed to with everyone in a public forum and that their government employers facilitate such interactions. This way what the people find out about doesn’t depend on which questions they already know to ask.

Of course, health possesses a tricky identity in this information landscape. I’m reminded of an article journalist Anoo Bhuyan wrote in 2018, after Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan revealed he had been diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumour. In one evocative passage, Bhuyan laid out the starkly different ways in which Bollywood stars and Indian political leaders addressed public concerns about their medical state.

Bollywood celebrities have no responsibility to be accountable to the public about their health. Yet, they have often been transparent. However, same cannot be said about Indian politicians across parties and across the country. Sonia Gandhi, J. Jayalalithaa, Manohar Parrikar, Sushma Swaraj, Amar Singh and a number of other prominent figures have all been and continue to be tight-lipped about their health. More importantly, they are unaccountable about their inability to perform the jobs for which they were elected.

The empathetic coverage of Pettit as he exited the Soyuz capsule struck an edifying contrast with a lot of media coverage of Sunita Williams that sought details about her health that, should anyone have acquired them, would have constituted a violation of her privacy.

At the same time, human spaceflight is becoming an increasingly prominent preoccupation of many countries. It is both very expensive and, the way it is organised in India (guided as much by political ambitions as by scientific ones and with rarely proactive outreach), is hard to hold accountable.

What astronauts as prominent as Williams, Wilmore, and Pettit say — who are also experienced in ways that few others are — will go a long way towards allowing anyone with an internet connection to participate, learn, and keep up rather than become disengaged and left behind.

Yet the simple fact of an astronaut being a public figure doesn’t mean all their personal details should be availed for public consumption.

Shatrugan Sinha’s advice, as he provided it in Bhuyan’s article, is fitting here: that anyone should be able to share information about their ailments without fear of being removed from their current posts and of being discriminated against for it. The former is currently easier because it is techne — determined by the technical prowess of the times to cure a disease or ‘remove’ a condition’ — while the latter is harder for being episteme, a way of thinking and thus more firmly enmeshed In the mores of the time. Perhaps political leaders are tight-lipped because they know this better than anyone. It is nonetheless unfortunate.

Astronauts are more like film stars here: they owe us no accountability about how they are faring, but if they do elect to share, it can go a long away towards destigmatising the public perception of their work as well as understand what astronauts everywhere, including budding ones at home, are expected to go through.

Finally some external validation. After months of insisting Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore aren’t “stuck” or “stranded” in the International Space Station, after Boeing Starliner’s first crewed flight test went awry, the two astronauts have themselves repudiated the use of such words to describe their mission profile so far. On February 18, Moneycontrol quoted a CNN report to say:

In an interview with CNN, Wilmore said they are neither abandoned nor stuck. “We come prepared and committed,” he stated, adding that all ISS astronauts have emergency return options. Williams also reflected on their space experience, saying, “Floating in space never gets old.”

Williams’s statement isn’t bravado just much as the use of “stranded” isn’t a matter of describing what’s right in front of us. Crewed missions to space are always more complicated than that. That’s why Boeing picked Williams and Wilmore in the first place: they’re veteran astronauts who know when not to panic. To quote from a previous post:

The history of spaceflight — human or robotic — is the history of people trying to expect the unexpected and to survive the unexpectable. That’s why we have test flights and then we have redundancies. For example, after the Columbia disaster in 2003, part of NASA’s response was a new protocol: that astronauts flying in faulty space capsules could dock at the ISS until the capsule was repaired or a space agency could launch a new capsule to bring them back. So Williams and Wilmore aren’t “stuck” there: they’re practically following protocol.

For its upcoming Gaganyaan mission, ISRO has planned multiple test flights leading up the human version. It’s possible this flight or subsequent ones could throw up a problem, causing the astronauts within to take shelter at the ISS. Would we accuse ISRO of keeping them “stuck” there or would we laud the astronauts’ commitment to the mission and support ISRO’s efforts to retrieve them safely?

… “stuck” or “stranded” implies a crisis, an outcome that no party involved in the mission planned for. It creates the impression human spaceflight (in this particular mission) is riskier than it is actually and produces false signals about the competencies of the people who planned the mission. It also erects unreasonable expectations about the sort of outcomes test flights can and can’t have.

Narratives matter. Words don’t always describe only what the senses can perceive. Certain words, including “stuck” and “stranded”, also impute intentions, motive, and agency — which are things we can’t piece together without involving the people to whom we are attributing these things (while ensuring they have the ability and opportunity to speak up). Wilmore says he’s “committed”, not “stuck”. When Williams says “floating in space never gets old”, it means among other things that she’s allowed to define her journey in that way without only navigating narratives in which she’s “stranded”.

In fact, as we make more forays into space — whether specific tasks like taking a brand new crew capsule for its first spin, guiding robots into previously uncharted areas of space or ourselves going where only robots have been before — we need to stay open to the unexpected and we need to keep ready a language that doesn’t belittle or diminish the human experience of it, which by all means can be completely wonderful.

Finally, I support restricting our language to what’s right in front of us in the event that we don’t know, which would be to simply say they’re in space.

NavIC’s hurdles project govt’s reluctance to fund innovation’, Hindustan Times, February 7, 2025:

India … chose a more cautious path. For decades, we’ve been telling ourselves that we’ll invest in science “when we’re economically better off.” It’s both prudent and a paradox. How do you become economically better off without investing in the very thing that drives development in the first place? It’s like waiting to plant a tree until you’re sure it will bear fruit tomorrow. That hesitation shows in the numbers: India spends just 0.6% of its GDP on scientific research. For comparison, China spends over 2.5%, and the United States spends 3%.

Charles Assisi has an interesting analysis of the partial failure of the NVS-02 mission. (‘Partial’ because ISRO is currently looking to repurpose the satellite. The terms of this exercise aren’t yet clear.) “When you’re constantly short of funds, every setback feels heavier” — spot on. In fact, my cynical self inclined is inclined ask him if he really believes the present government is interested in stoking development when it has been making the right noises, but only noises, about increasing the private sector’s contribution to R&D expenses while allowing the growth of the public sector’s contribution to grow more slowly than the GDP.

This said, I’m more curious about the final sentence of the same paragraph:

Worse still, when you dig into the details, much of India’s scientific budget is buried within defense spending, which means it doesn’t always trickle down to civilian applications or long-term innovation.

Unless growth in defence spending has somehow exactly matched decline in spending on R&D, I’m curious how defence alone can be said to have subtracted from science. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn’t, but I wouldn’t have used the argument because it presumes whatever that money was spent on didn’t have civilian interests at heart. It’s a strawman. It isn’t a crime without a victim either because of the notion that the scientific enterprise is incapable of delivering anything less than “civilian applications or long-term innovation”, even with sufficient funding. The arc of the scientific enterprise doesn’t bend towards the public interest by itself.

It’s also possible that what the R&D budget lost, the nuclear establishment gained — and I could get behind that. But beyond the subtraction itself, the question of which ministry or sector benefited is meaningless. The finance ministry makes its allocations from a large pool, and it only makes sense to talk about what science lost in terms of what science lost, rather than because X gained rather than Y.

In a WhatsApp group of which I’m a part, there’s a heated discussion going on around an article published by NDTV on June 10, entitled ‘Sun’s Fury May Fry Satellites, But India Has A Watchful Space Protector’. The article was published after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) published images of the Sun the Aditya L1 spacecraft (including its coronagraph) captured during the May solar storm. The article also features quotes by ISRO chairman S. Somanath — and some of them in particular prompted the discussion. For example, he says:

“Aditya L1 captured when the Sun got angry this May. If it gets furious in the near future, as scientists suggest, India’s 24x7X365 days’ eye on the Sun is going to provide a forewarning. After all, we have to protect the 50-plus Indian satellites in space that have cost the country an estimated more than ₹ 50,000 crore. Aditya L1 is a celestial protector for our space assets.”

A space scientist on the group pointed out that any solar event that could fry satellites in Earth orbit would also fry Aditya L1, which is stationed at the first Earth-Sun Lagrange point (1.5 million km from Earth in the direction of the Sun), so it doesn’t make sense to describe this spacecraft as a “protector” of India’s “space assets”. Instead, the scientist said, we’re better off describing Aditya L1 as a science mission, which is what it’d been billed as.

Another space scientist in the same group contended that the coronagraph onboard Aditya L1, plus its other instruments, still give the spacecraft a not insignificant early-warning ability, using which ISRO could consider protective measures. He also said not all solar storms are likely to fry all satellites around Earth, only the very powerful ones; likewise, not all satellites around Earth are equally engineered to withstand solar radiation that is more intense than usual, to varying extents. With these variables in mind, he added, Aditya L1 — which is protected to a greater degree — could give ISRO folks enough head start to manoeuvre ‘weaker’ satellites out of harm’s way or prevent catastrophic failures. By virtue of being ISRO’s eyes on the Sun, then, he suggested Aditya L1 was a scientific mission that could also perform some, but not all, of the functions expected of a full-blown early warning system.

(For such a system vis-a-vis solar weather, he said the fourth or the fifth Earth-Sun Lagrange points would have been better stations.)

I’m putting this down here as a public service message. Characterising a scientific mission — which is driven by scientists’ questions, rather than ISRO’s perception of threats or as part of any overarching strategy of the Indian government — as something else is not harmless because it downplays the fact that we have open questions and that we need to spend time and money answering them. It also creates a false narrative about the mission’s purpose that the people who have spent years designing and building the instruments onboard Aditya L1 don’t deserve, and a false impression of how much room the Indian space programme currently has to launch and operate spacecraft that are dedicated to providing early warnings of bad solar weather.

To be fair, the NDTV article says in a few places that Aditya L1 is a scientific mission, as does astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury in the last paragraph. It’s just not clear why Somanath characterised it as a “protector” and as a “space-based insurance policy”. NDTV also erred by putting “protector” in the headline (based on my experiences at The Wire and The Hindu, most readers of online articles read and share nothing more than the headline). That it was the ISRO chairman who said these things is more harmful: as the person heading India’s nodal space research body, he has a protagonist’s role in making room in the public imagination for the importance and wonders of scientific missions.

While space is hard, there are also different kinds of hardness. For example, on April 15, ISRO issued a press release saying it had successfully tested nozzles made of a carbon-carbon composite that would replace those made of Columbium alloy in the PSLV rocket’s fourth stage and thus increase the rocket’s payload capacity by 15 kg. Just 15 kg!

The successful testing of the C-C nozzle divergent marked a major milestone for ISRO. On March 19, 2024, a 60-second hot test was conducted at the High-Altitude Test (HAT) facility in ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC), Mahendragiri, confirming the system’s performance and hardware integrity. Subsequent tests, including a 200-second hot test on April 2, 2024, further validated the nozzle’s capabilities, with temperatures reaching 1216K, matching predictions.

Granted, the PSLV’s cost of launching a single kilogram to low-earth orbit is more than 8 lakh rupees (a very conservative estimate, I reckon) – meaning an additional 15 kg means at least an additional Rs 1.2 crore per launch. But finances alone are not a useful way to evaluate this addition: more payload mass could mean, say, one additional instrument onboard an indigenous spacecraft instead of waiting for a larger rocket to become available or postponing that instrument’s launch to a future mission.

But equally fascinating, and pride- and notice-worthy, to me is the fact that ISRO’s scientists and engineers were able to fine-tune the PSLV to this extent. This isn’t to say I’m surprised they were able to do it at all; on the contrary, it means the feat is as much about the benefits accruing to the rocket, and the Indian space programme by extension, as about R&D advances on the materials science front. It speaks to the oft-underestimated importance of the foundations on which a space programme is built.

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre … has leveraged advanced materials like Carbon-Carbon (C-C) Composites to create a nozzle divergent that offers exceptional properties. By utilizing processes such as carbonization of green composites, Chemical Vapor Infiltration, and High-Temperature Treatment, it has produced a nozzle with low density, high specific strength, and excellent stiffness, capable of retaining mechanical properties even at elevated temperatures.

A key feature of the C-C nozzle is its special anti-oxidation coating of Silicon Carbide, which extends its operational limits in oxidizing environments. This innovation not only reduces thermally induced stresses but also enhances corrosion resistance, allowing for extended operational temperature limits in hostile environments.

The advances here draw from insights into metallurgy, crystallography, ceramic engineering, composite materials, numerical methods, etc., which in turn stand on the shoulders of people trained well enough in these areas, the educational institutions (and their teachers) that did so, and the schooling system and socio-economic support structures that brought them there. A country needs a lot to go right for achievements like squeezing an extra 15 kg into the payload capacity of an already highly fine-tuned machine to be possible. It’s a bummer that such advances are currently largely vertically restricted, except in the case of the Indian space programme, rather than diffusing freely across sectors.

Other enterprises ought to have these particular advantages ISRO enjoys. Even should one or two rockets fail, a test not work out or a spacecraft go kaput sooner than designed, the PSLV’s new carbon-carbon-composite nozzles stand for the idea that we have everything we need to keep trying, including the opportunity to do better next time. They represent the idea of how advances in one field of research can lead to advances in another, such that each field is no longer held back by the limitations of its starting conditions.

While space is hard, there are also different kinds of hardness. For example, on April 15, ISRO issued a press release saying it had successfully tested nozzles made of a carbon-carbon composite that would replace those made of Columbium alloy in the PSLV rocket’s fourth stage and thus increase the rocket’s payload capacity by 15 kg. Just 15 kg!

The successful testing of the C-C nozzle divergent marked a major milestone for ISRO. On March 19, 2024, a 60-second hot test was conducted at the High-Altitude Test (HAT) facility in ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC), Mahendragiri, confirming the system’s performance and hardware integrity. Subsequent tests, including a 200-second hot test on April 2, 2024, further validated the nozzle’s capabilities, with temperatures reaching 1216K, matching predictions.

Granted, the PSLV’s cost of launching a single kilogram to low-earth orbit is more than 8 lakh rupees (a very conservative estimate, I reckon) – meaning an additional 15 kg means at least an additional Rs 1.2 crore per launch. But finances alone are not a useful way to evaluate this addition: more payload mass could mean, say, one additional instrument onboard an indigenous spacecraft instead of waiting for a larger rocket to become available or postponing that instrument’s launch to a future mission.

But equally fascinating, and pride- and notice-worthy, to me is the fact that ISRO’s scientists and engineers were able to fine-tune the PSLV to this extent. This isn’t to say I’m surprised they were able to do it at all; on the contrary, it means the feat is as much about the benefits accruing to the rocket, and the Indian space programme by extension, as about R&D advances on the materials science front. It speaks to the oft-underestimated importance of the foundations on which a space programme is built.

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre … has leveraged advanced materials like Carbon-Carbon (C-C) Composites to create a nozzle divergent that offers exceptional properties. By utilizing processes such as carbonization of green composites, Chemical Vapor Infiltration, and High-Temperature Treatment, it has produced a nozzle with low density, high specific strength, and excellent stiffness, capable of retaining mechanical properties even at elevated temperatures.

A key feature of the C-C nozzle is its special anti-oxidation coating of Silicon Carbide, which extends its operational limits in oxidizing environments. This innovation not only reduces thermally induced stresses but also enhances corrosion resistance, allowing for extended operational temperature limits in hostile environments.

The advances here draw from insights into metallurgy, crystallography, ceramic engineering, composite materials, numerical methods, etc., which in turn stand on the shoulders of people trained well enough in these areas, the educational institutions (and their teachers) that did so, and the schooling system and socio-economic support structures that brought them there. A country needs a lot to go right for achievements like squeezing an extra 15 kg into the payload capacity of an already highly fine-tuned machine to be possible. It’s a bummer that such advances are currently largely vertically restricted, except in the case of the Indian space programme, rather than diffusing freely across sectors.

Other enterprises ought to have these particular advantages ISRO enjoys. Even should one or two rockets fail, a test not work out or a spacecraft go kaput sooner than designed, the PSLV’s new carbon-carbon-composite nozzles stand for the idea that we have everything we need to keep trying, including the opportunity to do better next time. They represent the idea of how advances in one field of research can lead to advances in another, such that each field is no longer held back by the limitations of its starting conditions.

While space is hard, there are also different kinds of hardness. For example, on April 15, ISRO issued a press release saying it had successfully tested nozzles made of a carbon-carbon composite that would replace those made of Columbium alloy in the PSLV rocket's fourth stage and thus increase the rocket's payload capacity by 15 kg. Just 15 kg!

The successful testing of the C-C nozzle divergent marked a major milestone for ISRO. On March 19, 2024, a 60-second hot test was conducted at the High-Altitude Test (HAT) facility in ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC), Mahendragiri, confirming the system's performance and hardware integrity. Subsequent tests, including a 200-second hot test on April 2, 2024, further validated the nozzle's capabilities, with temperatures reaching 1216K, matching predictions.

Granted, the PSLV's cost of launching a single kilogram to low-earth orbit is more than 8 lakh rupees (a very conservative estimate, I reckon) – meaning an additional 15 kg means at least an additional Rs 1.2 crore per launch. But finances alone are not a useful way to evaluate this addition: more payload mass could mean, say, one additional instrument onboard an indigenous spacecraft instead of waiting for a larger rocket to become available or postponing that instrument's launch to a future mission.

But equally fascinating, and pride- and notice-worthy, to me is the fact that ISRO's scientists and engineers were able to fine-tune the PSLV to this extent. This isn't to say I'm surprised they were able to do it at all; on the contrary, it means the feat is as much about the benefits accruing to the rocket, and the Indian space programme by extension, as about R&D advances on the materials science front. It speaks to the oft-underestimated importance of the foundations on which a space programme is built.

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre … has leveraged advanced materials like Carbon-Carbon (C-C) Composites to create a nozzle divergent that offers exceptional properties. By utilizing processes such as carbonization of green composites, Chemical Vapor Infiltration, and High-Temperature Treatment, it has produced a nozzle with low density, high specific strength, and excellent stiffness, capable of retaining mechanical properties even at elevated temperatures.

A key feature of the C-C nozzle is its special anti-oxidation coating of Silicon Carbide, which extends its operational limits in oxidizing environments. This innovation not only reduces thermally induced stresses but also enhances corrosion resistance, allowing for extended operational temperature limits in hostile environments.

The advances here draw from insights into metallurgy, crystallography, ceramic engineering, composite materials, numerical methods, etc., which in turn stand on the shoulders of people trained well enough in these areas, the educational institutions (and their teachers) that did so, and the schooling system and socio-economic support structures that brought them there. A country needs a lot to go right for achievements like squeezing an extra 15 kg into the payload capacity of an already highly fine-tuned machine to be possible. It's a bummer that such advances are currently largely vertically restricted, except in the case of the Indian space programme, rather than diffusing freely across sectors.

Other enterprises ought to have these particular advantages ISRO enjoys. Even should one or two rockets fail, a test not work out or a spacecraft go kaput sooner than designed, the PSLV's new carbon-carbon-composite nozzles stand for the idea that we have everything we need to keep trying, including the opportunity to do better next time. They represent the idea of how advances in one field of research can lead to advances in another, such that each field is no longer held back by the limitations of its starting conditions.