Space exploration diversifies. Will Bangladesh ever enter the race?
India recently became the first South Asian nation to venture into space. As space is becoming increasingly democratised, does Bangladesh have any plans to one day enter the race?
There was a time when space exploration was dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union. On 4 October 1957, during the cold war period, the United of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) launched the first artificial satellite named Sputnik to orbit Earth.
The first human in space was the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who made one orbit around Earth on 12 April 1961, following which, the USA sent Alan Shepard on 5 May 1961.
Since that time, the world has travelled many times in its orbit and it's no longer just these two powerful countries who have explored space. It is not just about warfare and power anymore.
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On 15 October 2003, China became the third country after Russia and the United States to launch a crewed spacecraft. Shenzhou 5 carried the first Chinese astronaut, pilot Yang Liwei, on a 21-hour spaceflight.
As of late 2021, there were around 4,852 operational satellites in orbit—2,944 belonging to the United States. And according to the data, the USA, Russia and China have sent a total of 339, 121 and 18 humans into space.
The data shows that the USA have launched the most objects into space, 5534 and Russia has launched 3611 and China has launched 731 objects.
In total, around 86 countries have attempted to enter space and as of 2022, only 11 countries have the ability to send objects into space using their own launch vehicles, and only three—the US, Russia and China—have ever launched people into outer space.
And now in 2023, India became the first South Asian nation to venture into space. The launch of Chandrayaan-3 took place on 14 July 2023 at 2:35 pm local time Friday from India's main spaceport on Sriharikota, an island off the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
The country is also in discussions with Japan to work on a moon mission together, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman S Somanath told reporters in New Delhi on 17 July.
Chandrayan-3 will spend about six weeks in space before attempting to touch down close to the lunar south pole, near where India's previous moon mission, Chandrayan-2, ended in a crash in 2019. The journey from Earth to the moon is estimated to take about a month, and the landing is expected on August 23.
The question is, do all these indicate the democratisation of space?
According to Ariel Ekblaw, the founder and Director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, "The near future of near space, from low Earth orbit to the moon, will touch the lives of countless Earth citizens, via GPS satellites that power the apps in our pockets and space tourism that will give an entirely new audience the chance to experience the overview effect. We want these citizens to play a part in creating and shaping the technologies of space, whether or not they travel there themselves."
In one of Ekblaw's articles regarding the democratisation of space, she mentioned that no one institution, even one of NASA's scale, can serve the role of Starfleet Academy (In the fictional universe of Star Trek, Starfleet Academy is where recruits to Starfleet's officer corps are trained).
She further said, "Democratisation is ultimately about building and contributing to healthy, self-sustaining ecosystems. Our modern incarnation of Starfleet Academy will be a collective effort. Establishing long-term communities and broad engagement to realise a shared future requires rich collaboration and the sharing of technologies and ideas across institutions."
"It is not just about warfare and power anymore. The safety, security and well-being of our society are increasingly dependent on information and services provided from space," said Md. Nur Hossain Sharifee, one of the chief scientific officers of Bangladesh Space Research and Remote Sensing Organisation (SPARRSO).
Agriculture, fisheries, infrastructure, urban development (including land register or urban mobility), transportation, maritime activities, communication, tourism, banking, defence and security and many other sectors can be benefitted from this.
Where does Bangladesh stand?
SPARRSO is the only space research institution in Bangladesh. Do we have any plans of following up on India's massive achievement? On the condition of anonymity, one of the scientific officers of the organisation talked with us about this.
"SPARRSO is a very small organisation, compared to the other space research organisations of the world. If you consider the manpower, SPARRSO has 20-25 scientists, out of whom 9-10 scientists are new, with less than one year of experience. Which means we have at best 15 scientific officers who have noteworthy experience," he said.
"Now if you think about ISRO, the organisation has eight to ten thousand employees. I had the opportunity to work with ISRO at the section where the transformer and camera of satellites are designed, it was in Ahmedabad. It is one of the 15 organisations of ISRO and this one section is 20-30 times bigger than SPARRSO."
"The launching facility of ISRO is designed and established on an island near Tamil Nadu as big as Bangladesh's Swandip or Kutubdiya. This means they have used a huge land that could accommodate a city just for the launching facility. If you consider all these facilities, Bangladesh doesn't have any such plans for space expeditions in the future.``
So what does SPARRSO do?
Nur Hossain Sharifee said, "We receive data from the foreign satellites through our ground stations. We cannot receive all kinds of data - some we have to purchase from them, and some others are open-source data that are available on the internet. We monitor natural resources, climate change, the environment, forests and agriculture etc. We maintain the ground station, which is an insignificant part of what any other space research organisations do."
