The fever dream of 'technological sovereignty'
I recently came across an initiative called “Industrial47”. Someone had shared a link to it on a group I’m part of, and when its card loaded, the image was of a nuclear weapon going off. I found on L…
61 posts
I recently came across an initiative called “Industrial47”. Someone had shared a link to it on a group I’m part of, and when its card loaded, the image was of a nuclear weapon going off. I found on L…
This is xkcd #1232. When it came out I remember it was to rebut a particular line of argument against NASA’s lunar and interplanetary missions — that the agency was spending large sums of money that w…
"First, a clarification: Unlike in Gravity, the 2013 film about two astronauts left adrift after space debris damages their shuttle, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are not stuck in space."…
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 W…
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…
This post is in response to a question on Reddit about why the Indian government won’t increase ISRO’s space budget. There’s a good analogy in India’s research budget. As a share of the GDP, the nati…
Talk of chat AI* is everywhere, as I'm sure you know. Everyone would like to know where these apps are headed and what their long-term effects are likely to be. But it seems that it's still to…
Excerpt from The Hindu, November 4, 2023: S. Somanath, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told The Hindu that he’s withdrawing the publication of his memoir, Nilavu Kudicha Simhanga…
On October 17, the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) introduced a reading module for middle-school students called “Chandrayaan Utsav”. It was released by Union Education Mi…
For all the hoopla over indigeneity – from ISRO chairman S. Somanath exalting the vast wisdom of ancient Indians to political and ideological efforts to cast modern India as the world’s ‘vishwaguru’ –…
Vivek Agnihotri's next film, The Vaccine War, is set to be released on September 28. It is purportedly about the making of Covaxin, the COVID-19 vaccine made by Bharat Biotech, and claims to be ba…
I'm grateful to Avijit Pathak for his article in Indian Express on August 29. After the Chandrayaan 3 mission achieved its primary objective, to soft-land a robotic lander on the moon's south…