 experiences. And so then about a couple of weeks later he said, okay, we'll have a pivot. And I still don't quite know what a pivot is. But he said, he said, you can just talk about your experiences. So that's what I'm going to do. I'll just, I'll start at the beginning and carry on to where I am now. So first of all, I should introduce myself. I'm Jayanth Murthy. I'm a senior professor at the at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. I got my PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1987. I worked for two years at Goddard Space Flight Center as a national research council fellow. And I went back to Hopkins for another 10 years as a research scientist. And I joined the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in about the turn of this century in about 2000. So, so I'll go back all over all of that again. But let me start with with what got me into science in the first place. So that would be that's I remember the Apollo eight astronauts going around the moon. But but just barely that was 1968. So what I do remember well is is Neil Armstrong landing on the moon 1969. And so I remember watching it on the we had a tiny 11 inch black and white TV. And saw Neil Armstrong step out on the moon. We listened to to to the broadcasts. And I of course, I'd always been interested in science. From the time I was about six or seven. But but but then this this, I guess, this triggered an interest in space science for me. Now, over the next few years, my parents, they wanted me to go into medicine. My mother wanted me to be an engineer. My father wanted me to go into medicine. And I knew I didn't want to do medicine. It's kind of boring. So I I but I did start out in biology. I went to Hopkins first in 1977 as an undergraduate. And I started out in biology. And then after about a year, I what you had to do in those days in biology was you had to take organic chemistry. And perhaps this is still true. And I just got tired of Latin names. And I didn't want to take organic chemistry. And I was always taking the more advanced physics courses. So I went into physics. I didn't tell my parents for a year. But I mean, this was this was the US. And so you had had had a lot of freedom to do what you wanted. So so then the next time I went home, I said, by the way, I've switched from biology to physics. And they weren't very happy about it. But but anyway. So in 19, when I graduated as an undergraduate in 1981. And by the way, I actually I don't have a BSC. Johns Hopkins is the oldest university in the country in the in the US. It started in 1876. And so they give a BA, they don't give a BSC. So I have a Bachelor of Arts, and I have a Master of Arts in physics. So I'm not actually sure if I can get a job in an Indian University, because they need an MSC, and I don't have an MSC. Anyway, fortunately, I didn't ask me and I didn't tell them. So so maybe I'm okay. So I so then in 1981, when I got my when I when I just finishing my bachelors, I was looking around for a place to do graduate school. And by the way, I always knew that I wanted to get a PhD. I don't know why but but I always knew I was going to get a PhD. There was no question of leaving after a bachelor's or anything like that. My only option, I didn't have a plan B. Plan A was to get a PhD. And so I was looking around for places to go. And 1981 was when the Space Telescope went to Johns Hopkins. And so I thought that it would be a good time to work with the Space Telescope. And so I stayed on at Hopkins. And I mean, normally, you shouldn't do that. Normally, you should go somewhere else. But I thought Space Telescope was coming. So I thought it was a good thing to do. It turned out that that the Space Telescope, for many reasons, had a lot of delays. And when actually when they came to Hopkins, what the first years all the first year students were put in one big hall about the same size as this hall, there were about 28 of us here, long tables. And as soon as Space Telescope came, we were all kicked out. That room was given over to Space Telescope and we were dispersed over the building. Now, the building where where we were at the time that was Roland Hall. And that was after after Henry Roland, who was one of the best known physicists of the of the turn of the 20th century. In fact, my advisor Dick Henry, he still has Roland's old desk. So so we were kicked out into all the old rooms there. I was sent down to the basement. Now, in as you know, the Cold War was a was a big thing. Not not when I went, but not that much longer, not that much earlier. And when I went there, we still I was sent to the basement, which was actually the bomb shelter. So they had these big doors that you were supposed to slam shut in case of air raid. And I guess you would come out to a nuclear wasteland and live happily ever after. But anyway, that's that's where I was. It the office where I was was also the junk room. So I had a I had a space I was sharing with two other people. And in the room behind me was where all the junk of 100 years of physics labs were put. So it was an interesting place. Now in so so I so because space telescope took so much time, and because there was not much work for students to do at the at the beginning, it turns out that I didn't actually get to work with the early part of the space telescope anyway. So in 81, I guess, 82 or 83, after I got my masters, I decided to start work in in experimental astrophysics. Johns Hopkins was one of the three or four places that had an active sounding rocket program. And specifically, they were one of the top places in the country in in ultraviolet astronomy. Now you'll ask why why ultraviolet astronomy? It when when NASA decided to when when NASA decided to go into astronomy. Now, NASA has always had a strong astronomy component. And I think the reason for this is because they realized that astronomers, scientists are the people who push the boundaries. Very often, if you want to put up a communication satellite, you just want incrementally changes. You don't want to have that that paradigm shift. Astronomers are the people who want always want to push the boundaries. If the spacecraft engineers will give you one arc second pointing, the astronomers want a tenth of an arc second pointing. If the spacecraft engineers will give you a 50 centimeter mirror, astronomers want a five meter mirror. So the astronomers push the boundaries. And that's where you make the major advances. Otherwise, otherwise you're satisfied with just getting a couple more transponders on or getting 10% increases in efficiency. So so NASA has always had this strong program. Now, when they started getting into astronomy, there was a bit of a tug of war between X-ray astronomy and UV astronomy. And they decided that UV astronomy was the way to go because UV is not so far from the visible. And so they thought that UV was a good place for all the optical astronomers to get to do. They would be comfortable working in the UV. And also the UV is where much of the most of the fundamental science is. If you look at all of the interesting astronomical lines, if you look at water, if you look at hydrogen, if you look at oxygen, a lot of those lines are in the ultraviolet. And so it's a good place to do science. And so they felt that with relatively minor improvements in technology or with relatively modest technology, they could make good science gains in the ultraviolet. And so they put a lot of money, a lot of effort into ultraviolet astronomy. And Johns Hopkins, with starting with Bill Fasty, and then Paul Feldman, Warren Moose, my own advisor, Dick Henry, it was one of the main places for ultraviolet astronomy. So that's where I started in, I started a project in in 83. And what my project was was to work on a experiment for the space shuttle. Now this was the space shuttle had had was good was to carry all the hopes of NASA with it. It was going to be the the one that would make going to suborbital or going to orbital. The same as going from New York to London. Everything was going to be taken up by the space by the space shuttle. You wouldn't have any need for rockets anymore, because the space shuttle would be just like a plane. Take you up, bring you down. And it would be it would take the cost might be $100 per kg. So we were caught in that in that cycle. And what what the goal was was eventually to move all astronomers over to the space shuttle. So they had they had something called that they called a getaway special. And that was a gas can. And that was a can about one one and a half meters in height, maybe about 75 centimeters in diameter. And you're supposed to put experiments in there. So like on the space shuttle, many of the experiments were ants in space and how you how plants grow and all that kind of useless stuff. But they decided that that but we were we were going to be the test bed for astronomy. So at Hopkins and and at Berkeley, there had been a long standing controversy about about what the sky looked like. And so Charlie Pellerin, who was the head of the getaway special program at the time, he said, Okay, why don't we fly these two guys together? These two guys, they fly rockets all the time. They never agree. So we'll, we'll make them fly on this at the same time, looking at the same places. And we'll see if they agree. And so that was what the gas can was. And we were supposed to fly in, we in, I guess, 84. And we did it pretty close, we flew and I think it was 86. And we were the last shuttle before the challenger. So now the challenger accident was was 1986. And I was on the basketball court, it was at about, I guess, 1230 or one. So normally, we played basketball, three days, I was a gym rat, played basketball three days a week. Ultimate Frisbee Frisbee three days a week. Sunday was my day off. And and so I was on the basketball court. And one of the students came out and he said, the space shuttle exploded. So we were all playing basketball, none of us heard him properly. And so we kept on playing. And then at 2230, our basketball games were good two and a half hours. So in and this was in the days before an air conditioned gym. So we would play in 45 degrees, 50 degrees. It was pretty, pretty wearing. So we went back to the so when I went back to the department, then everyone was quiet. And it was a major disaster for for astronomy. I was graduating just about that time in 86. And before before the shuttle exploded, there were something like 1015 jobs a month. After the shuttle for space science, after the shuttle exploded, there was maybe one job a year. So I had a job lined up at Northwestern to work on the Compton Gamma Observatory. And when the shuttle exploded, everything dried up. No money at all. It was almost like Trump was there. So so so then I our payload had already been delayed by two years, our shuttle payload. And so I had to I had told my advisor that, you know, I've been here for for whatever it was three years. I think it's time I left. And so I picked up another project and I did my thesis on something else. But then we got data from from our shuttle program. And so I stayed on at Hopkins for another year to write up that data. And it turns out that we still didn't agree with the UCB guys. So so so that that's the way that goes. So then in 86, as I was saying, the jobs really dried up. And and so I was looking around pretty, pretty desperately for jobs. And fortunately, I got one of these National Academy of Sciences fellowships at Goddard. So I went to Goddard for two years. The guy I was going to work for, he actually left before I joined. So it was a little bit of a, I was left almost alone at Goddard for two years. And it's actually not a good thing. Because just after you finish your PhD, you're you're not really ready to do anything new. So so I was left alone for two years. And I did some things. But it was a pretty inefficient time. And then I didn't like Goddard at all. In the days when I was there, this was 88 and 89. In the days I was there, it was actually 89 and 90. There was it was still a fairly open place. One time I had to give my car for servicing Goddard, by the way, it's in Hopkins was is right in the middle of the city. And so I always lived right next to this campus. And I would walk to the campus. It was a pretty unsafe area where the areas where I lived there were drug gangs just the one street over from where I lived. We it was not uncommon for us to hear gunshots. But I used to I was I was what I was 21 22 23. So I would happily walk back and forth that midnight. It was it was perhaps not the not the smartest thing to do. But but I survived. And so when I went to Goddard, Goddard is out in the middle of the suburbs. And in American suburbs, you can't manage without a car. There's absolutely no place that you can live close to Goddard without a car. So I had a car and I would drive in and then once I gave my car to servicing, and I left my Goddard badge in the car. And so this now I don't believe they would let you in. But in those days, they were laid back. I went to the to the security guard. And he said, Okay, I'll write your name down on my book. If you ever do it again, I'll, I'll blackball you. And then he let me in. We had a time when some guy forgot his badge and he climbed over the fence. The security chased him for a while, but but they didn't catch him. So I was in I was in what was I was in building 21 at Goddard. And Goddard for for those of you who may not know, it's really the main science center of NASA. Ames has a has a fairly good science program. But Goddard is is is where at least all the ultra violet ultraviolet astronomy, the gamma ray astronomy, the x ray astronomy, that all comes out of Goddard. And building 21 was where much of the it was the science directorate code 680. And and that's where that's where the science was done. Now, when I was at Goddard, because I was a National Research Council fellow, we were not really part of that civil service establishment. And so NASA had all sorts of rules. And you couldn't have a civil service guy sit with a contractor. They didn't want to hire too many civil service people, because of course, once you hire a government employee, you can't get rid of them. So so they mean, it's not quite true, but but pretty close. So they didn't want to hire people for all these spacecraft projects. So they hired contractors, but contractors can't share offices with government employees. So because we were sort of loose cannons, they shifted us around from here to there. When I joined Goddard, you could still smoke on your on in your office. So that was in 1989. And so once I was put in with with the smoker, which was a terrible time for me. Within few months, they allowed smoking only in the way the building was was that you had the main building. And then you had an airlock. And then you had the outside. So you had double doors. And so then they allowed smoking in those in that little place between the doors. So you can imagine five people sitting in there smoking. And that was a you had to hold your breath when you went out. Then after that, they moved everyone outside. And now they don't allow smoking anywhere on campus, which is true at at Hopkins. Also, they used to allow smoking in the offices. Now they don't allow smoking anywhere on campus. So we were we were moved around. So I had like four different offices at Goddard, one of and then there were all sorts of things at Goddard that bothered me. They once they ran out of paper in August, and that they couldn't buy any new paper until October, because that was the financial half year or whatever. So we all had to walk around with our own stacks of paper for for for three months. So after after Goddard, I went back to Hopkins. And what I did there was, we were working on on a project called Huby. Now NASA has these Explorer programs. And you have Explorer programs of different classes. You have a small explorers, medium explorers, and then the the whatever called this discovery class missions. So we were working on a project for a for a small Explorer, and then for a medium Explorer. The way it works is that the only difference between them is the budget. So we would look at the budget, and we would change our budget to match whatever they asked for. Same same proposal. If they asked for $30 million, we'd put in a budget for $30 million. If they asked for $80 million, we would put in a budget for $80 million. And the way that these proposals are all were always done is that you tie up with some major contractor aerospace contractor. So we would tie up many times we tied up with ball aerospace. Many times we did it with APL applied physics lab. Now all of these guys, they depend on contracts for they depend on these contracts, the military industrial complex. So they depend on these spacecraft contracts for their survival. So they had a budget dedicated to proposals. So they would have they would they would have a team who would work with you in putting together a proposal. So you would work on the science you would work on the science instrument. But this team would put together the spacecraft, they would put together whatever engineering you needed on the on the instrument. They would make sure everything worked. And then finally, we would put it you would get a nice glossy proposal, two page spiral bound with with glossy photographs, fold out pages and all a very professionally professional job. And you would submit it to NASA. And then NASA would take their time they would think about it. And then they would come back and tell you whether you were accepted or not. So in 1990, when I went back to Hopkins, we were, we had just we were selected as one of the options to fly on this midsize Explorer. The other option was was W map, the microwave and isotropy probe. And naturally enough, because that was hot right after Kobe, then for the microwave background, they were the ones who got selected and we were an alternate program. And then after after that, so so we didn't get accepted. But then after that what happened was that I got I got involved in in a ballistic missile defense organization program BMDO, you may know it better as Star Wars. So what this this was something that Ronald Reagan did. And what he wanted to do was to shoot down 95% of all incoming Soviet missiles. Right so you have a lot of Soviet missiles coming in you shoot down 95% of them 5% of them still get through, which which doesn't do Washington DC or New York or Los Angeles any good. But still you get 95% of them. Now, sometime during the course of this program, this this was called so this the so the program I was on was called the mid course space experiment MSX. And the goal was that you would catch. It was part of the that the where you catch the rockets coming in you don't shoot them down. But we would catch the rockets coming in. And the person who led this program Steve Price from the Air Force Research Labs in near Boston. He had this idea he was very good at combining astronomy or at selling astronomy to the military. So he would do the astronomy that he wanted. But he would convince the the military that this was a good thing for them to do also. And so the way he sold this program to the military was that he said the the missiles are going to be coming down. But they have the sky behind them. So you have to know the sky in order to know what doesn't belong there. So so that was the idea he had there were a bunch of infrared instruments, which have done really good science. And there were what I was working on was the UV and visible instruments. We the instruments that were were they were overly ambitious. And so they didn't get as good science as they as they could have. I still have all of the data the data are stored at APL on on exabyte tapes. And I still have an entire copy of the data on on these digital tapes, except exabyte tapes, these four millimeter tapes. Unfortunately, my tape reader is now not working. And I know of no way to get that to get the tapes read. So if anyone knows how to get four millimeter dat tapes read, I have two terabytes of data sitting on on tapes. This was the time when we were still experimenting with data formats. And these tapes seem great, because discs were still expensive. CDs were only 700 megabytes. So it was a great thing to store four or five gigabytes, 10 gigabytes, 20 gigabytes by the end on the on these digital tapes. But the tape drive I have as a SCSI drive. And there are no SCSI ports anymore. And I don't know if my tape drive works. And I don't think there's anyone who can read four millimeter tapes anymore. So that's the way it goes. They're still sitting in in APL, but it took me three months to get the data into my tapes. And I just don't want to go through that again. So what? So now we were, we were I was working on the UV invisible part. Now sometime in the middle of the MSX program, the Russians collapsed. And then now you don't have to now you don't have to get 95% of all incoming Russian missiles anymore. So now what they they I guess the right term is now if they pivoted, and they they now said we'll get 100% of all Iranian missiles that come in, which I guess is more realistic or what is what is perhaps relevant now is we'll get 100% of all North Korean missiles that are coming in. And so and so we managed to continue. And it flew. We got we got data. I have one publication from it. But as I said, the data I don't really have a way to look at the data anymore. And what always happens with with scientists is that they're always so busy with with new things, that it's hard to to go back and look at something that's 30 years old, 20 years old. So there were a couple of funny things with MSX. They, the data were classified. But the astronomical data were unclassified from the moment they left the spacecraft. They, they cut out parts of the data where, where there were satellites going overhead. So we would have the data. We would have an observation and they would cut out a part of that observation because there was a satellite overhead. I guess eventually they figured out that you could tell where the satellites were from the parts they cut out. And so they stopped doing that and they just gave us all the all the data immediately. We still had to get it cleared before publication, but it was just a formality. So that was the one and only time I've ever worked on a Defense Department established project. Now they had different rules than than NASA projects. So in the Defense Department, any time you if there's money left over, they take it back. If there's equipment, they take it back. So you the goal with the Defense Department project, you always spend the money as soon as you can. Because once you spent the money, they can't take it back. And in fact, this happened with MSX. It was I had, I was I was being paid out of MSX. And then after I was I was being paid out of MSX. And I had some money to look at Voyager data. The we were Voyager Voyager by this time was already out at the edge of the solar system. And so we were looking at at Voyager data because we were interested in in getting out of the solar system. So anytime you're in the solar system, you see all this light from the sun, zodiacal light and so on. Further out you go the less zodiacal light. So Voyager, we were we looked at data all the way out to 100 AU. I have I have data out to 100 AU. So that was paying for half my salary. MSX was paying for half my salary. And then suddenly one day, they decide to cancel the program. Other people were hurt much more were hit much harder than I was. So there were people at APL, one guy was called in and said, so, so I'll leave his name out. So man, what are you doing tomorrow? Where are you going to work tomorrow? And it's quite literally day one day you have a job next day you don't have a job. So I think I had that month's salary. Next month, I didn't have a salary, or I had half my salary because I was paid from Voyager. So then by that time, we had got the fuse project, the far ultraviolet spectroscopic explorer at Hopkins. And they had asked me earlier if I would join them and I said, no, look, I'm too busy on this. So then I went and said, I need half time on this. And so they said, okay, and and I started working on on fuse software. And I wrote about some of the fuse pipeline. So it's still sitting there. The data from fuse are still there. And then eventually, I shifted over to fuse full time. And I was there until just after launch. Now the launch was in 99. And we were all supposed to go to Goddard for for flight tests. And as already by that time, I guess, NASA had started getting more stringent. And so they wanted me to fill out a long form to go to NASA as a non American. And I went and told the the the fuse API, I said, you know, this is such a pain. Do I really have to do this? And he said, no, don't worry about it. And then the next day or a couple of days later, they had the Indian nuclear tests. And then it became impossible for any Indian to go to Goddard anyway. I people who had these NRC fellowships, students and the senior NRC fellowships, senior faculty, their their trips were canceled, because because you just couldn't get Indians just couldn't go into Goddard. So then I was with fuse until until it launched in 1999. And I left pretty much immediately immediately after after it launched within a couple of months after it launched, it turns out it was probably I probably should have stayed six months longer. They had the first two fuse papers. And those papers have 1000 citations each. And because I'd left, they forgot to put me on. And by the time I noticed it was too late. And I told them I said, Why didn't you leave me out? And so they apologized. But but that's like 2000 citations that I don't have. So then what happened was in 99 I working on the fuse software, I decided that I didn't really want to do astronomical software for a career. I didn't want to do software as a career. So then I had an offer from from IPAC from the infrared processing analysis center was at Caltech. And and it was to do software for I think for for assertive, which is now spitzer. And, and I just didn't want to do I didn't want to do full time software, full time astronomical software, it's a different mindset. You do software, you don't do science, you just don't have time to do both. So I think I'm going to start speaking louder. So I didn't want to do the software. So so that was one thing. And then I also had an offer from the Swift program, which was had just been accepted. And they I had an offer to be the optical scientist, the scientist on the optical monitor. And that would actually have been a good thing. But then I was thinking that this is soft money. You in the in the US, you have these soft money positions where you're not tenured. And so that would have been an again a non tenured position. And after 10 years on Swift, I would again be in the same position, but but older. So it turns out that IPAC was actually a permanent position. But it turns out that those permanent positions are less permanent than than seemed at the time. So people who joined there at the time have now had to scramble around. But the main reason is that I had been talking to people at IA about about Astrosat, we had been the Astrosat was first proposed in, I guess, 88 or 89. And by the time it sort of came into fruition, it was mid 90s, mid 90s. And so Ashok Patti from from our Institute, he had, I had invited him to Hopkins. He came over, we had a discussion about collaborations. It nothing happened. But then they asked me if I wanted to join IA to work on Astrosat. And I thought it was a good opportunity Astrosat would should if it had launched in when it was supposed to, it would have been a major new advance, a big new ultraviolet mission. And it also I also had a bit of an existential crisis. If you're in the US, you're, no matter how big you are, you're a small fish in a big pond. I felt that if I joined IA, I might have the chance to make more of an impact that that that there are not so many. There are a lot of astronomers in India. But as far as publishing astronomers, there's not more than 100. So it's a much smaller community. And I thought it was a chance to make an impact in a smaller community. And so I came in September 1999 to do IA. And we were immediately working on on Astrosat. Now the problem is that so this is where it gets a little bit controversial. So in 1999, when when I joined the Astrosat program, there were a few of us working on it. They, we still had no formal approval from Astros. And so our Institute said, and I think rightly so, they said, unless we have a formal approval, we cannot put heavy resources into into into the project. And so the three or the four of us, we were struggling, we were struggling to put together the the proposal. And we finally did and the proposal was accepted in 2000. But Astros, they gave approval and they gave money to TIFR, but they did not give any money to IA. And part of the reason was that they said, we're not convinced that you can do it. But it's almost a chicken and an egg problem. If you're if you, if you say we're not convinced that you do that you can do it. But then you don't give any seed money to start. How are you going to show that you can do it? So we were struggling along like this for for two or three years. In fact, Ramnath Kaushik, who was the director at the time, he even told Astros, look, why don't you just stay out of it? We'll build we'll put in the money for our own payload. But Astros didn't want to do that. They wanted to keep control. And so finally, in 2002 or so, we had, we had, I think, done done a good job. But but the the ISRO philosophy is different. They don't understand scientists. They're very much. I think it's different. I think it was different in the old days. I think it was different when they started. It was a much more open culture. But certainly since I've come, ISRO has had no appreciation of the way that scientists work. And they have no appreciation of the way science works. And so they in they, they wanted to have things done in in in this specific manner. And they wanted to have things done with people that they trusted. And so in 2002 or 2003, maybe 2002 or 2003, they brought in a project manager. Now, the problem is that when you do this, you're bringing in someone who's already close to retirement. You're trying to do this with people who are you the if you're trying to build a space program, you need to do it with people who are who are in the prime of their career. And you need to constantly bring in new people so that there's a growth. So this is the way the American program started. When it started, everyone was new. But then it grew. They made mistakes. As they made mistakes, then they they didn't make the same mistakes twice. The teams grew. So there were larger and larger people groups of people. So they those rocket program at Johns Hopkins, that's fed much of the satellite of the current satellite programs in the US a good 1520 people. But if you have someone who's already close to retirement, and then you try to do it with retired ISRO engineers, you're just not growing your you may get something done, but you're not growing. And so this this I think was a big mistake. And I think it's hurting us now. So then in 2002, this, the project manager came in. And pretty soon, the rest of us found ourselves out. And this is something that I tell my I tell everyone if if if I have a problem with one person, maybe it's my fault. If I have a problem with everyone, then then, you know, maybe, maybe I'm the one to blame and not everyone around me. So we all had had our falling out with the project manager, we all left the program. And, frankly, I think for me, it was a good thing. So then this was 2002, 2003, and, and UVIT would kept going along. As you know, it flew in 2015, which is way too long for any scientific program. It's okay if you're going out to Pluto, you can't avoid it. Or if you're going to Saturn, again, you can't avoid it, you spend a significant fraction of your scientific life. But for a payload that's going into low earth orbit, to spend 13 years of your of your to spend 13 years or 15 years on that program, the science has already passed you by the science, the science of 2000 is not the same as the science of 2017. If you're going to Pluto, Pluto is not changed. Nothing is going to go to Pluto before you do. So new horizons, even though it launched in, when was it 2006 or seven? Even if it launched, then there's nothing going to go to Pluto before it does not know nothing you can do. So that science is not going to change. But for UVIT, Galaxy had already flown. Galaxy had flown in 2003. And it had stopped operation in 2010. So the science was already old. So then in 2003, I had been talking with with my Israeli collaborators, Noah Brosh at Tel Aviv University, about an opportunity to fly a payload that they already had built on an ISRO satellite. And the people at ISRO, especially Dr. Goel at Isaac, they were very encouraging. Now this was that this was a time when there were a lot of contacts between India and Israel. And Dr. Goel said he said that we have a lot of commercial contracts. But let's have something that's just a pure science contract. And so we did that we had a pure science contract. And the way that these things always work is that what happened is that Sharon had come to Delhi to talk to the Prime Minister. And Noah Brosh had managed to get Sharon to talk about topics with the Prime Minister. So Vajpayee at the time. So Vajpayee then asked ISRO, what is this project? And then Kastur Rangan, who was the chairman of ISRO at the time, he was going to Israel. And he said, I need a project because I have to sign off on something because why are you going to Israel? Well, you go off to Israel to sign off on a project. So the only thing that they had was my project. So then they called me in and within two days, they approved everything. And for any of you who worked with ISRO, you know that two days is a remarkable period of time for them to approve anything. Normally it's, I was going to say two decades, but maybe two years. But two days, they approved everything. And then it turned out that the Israeli space agency got cold feet. So they he actually didn't have anything to sign. But then in December of that year, the Israeli science minister came to India and he came to Bangalore. And this was on Christmas day of 2003. And so again, they have to have something to sign. So they signed, so they called me in and I had actually planned, we had a family vacation plan to Delhi and I said, look, I'm going to Delhi. I said, no, it doesn't matter. You cancel it. We want you here. So they had us there and we all signed this agreement. And that was 2003. It was supposed to fly in 2005. And then all sorts of problems with the GSLV. And in fact, we had a satellite and then GSLV3 blew up. And so they took our satellite and GSLV2, I think. Sorry. Anyway, one of them, they blew up and they took our satellite away from us. We were ready to go and they took the satellite away. And then finally, we were going to go on GSLV4. And we had a launch readiness review in 2010, January of 2010. 2010. And everyone was happy. We were sitting on the spacecraft. We'd been integrated with the spacecraft. We were sitting there. And then I went to Trivandrum for maybe Calicut, I think. I gave a talk at the planetarium there. And then as soon as I come back, I get a call from the ISAC director, T.K. Alex, and he said, how would you like to fly on a PSLV instead? I said, no, I'm quite happy where I am. And then it turns out that there were some concerns. And they said it was a weight concern. Our weight hadn't changed. We were the same weight for 10 years. We were already mounted on the spacecraft. The first time I've ever been on a project where after the launch readiness review, launch readiness review, you're ready to launch. After the launch readiness review, they took us off. And then they said, oh, they promised me a PSLV. It turned out it never happened. And so finally, we're scientists. We write papers. Noah Brosh and I, we wrote a paper on the failures of Tavex. And Isra was very unhappy with me. I got a call from, actually, Siddharj Hassan who was our director at the time, he got a call from T.K. Alex, and he said, you've got to stop this guy talking. And Siddharj, fortunately, he said, oh, I can't do that. And I got an official letter from him saying, you're not allowed to talk to the Israelis anymore. And so I sent back an email. I said, I don't work for you. But that was a, that was a pretty, I have, I ever since then, I've been leery of doing anything with this row, just because I don't, I don't trust the process there. And so this was, so this, it was, it was taken off in 2010. We tried for six months to get it on a PSLV. But it never happened. And now Tavex is sitting in a museum in Israel. We think that it was a waste of resources. It was something that was ready to go, mounted on the spacecraft. We'd already worked for so much time on it. And, and it just didn't take off. So then that brings us up to about 2010. Now, as I said, I was reasonably happy. I think I was, I was really upset at the time when, when I, when I was taken off of Astrosat. I mean, never officially was just sort of eased on out. But I think in retrospect, I think it was a good thing. Because again, working for 10 years, if I had been working on UVIT the whole time, it would have taken up 75% or 100% of my time. And especially the way that, that meetings go for these big projects. You have meetings. And in that meeting, you have, you have a bunch of agenda items. And in the next meeting, you have the same agenda might meet items, which you then push on to the next meeting. And so you never actually have a meeting in which you accomplish anything. You just have a meeting in which you discuss agenda items. And so, so I think that would have taken up a lot of time. And as it happened, I had a lot of extra time, which I've done and I give classes around, around the city. I've, I've had a, I, I, after, after UVIT and after TauX, I, my, my paper productivity jumped dramatically. Now, then, so the final stage of the, of this, of this journey, it was when we, we had, we decided to start a, an M tech PhD program with the University of Kolkata. Before that our sign, our students had, were all direct PhDs. So most of them were, so, so most of them were science, all of them were science PhDs. No instrumentation at all. But then once we started this program with the University of Kolkata, we started getting these students whose primary focus was astronomical instrumentation, not science PhDs, but astronomical instrumentation. And so we had to start, the, the goal was that the idea was that, was that in the country, we have too many people who are doing theory and not enough people who are working with their hands. So then once we got this program, then we were all looking around for things to do. And this was around the time that the low cost access to space really started becoming, coming into the news. So this was not long before the strand one that, that mobile phone that was launched by, by a PSLV and then phone sat by JPL. So these were all coming up then. And, and this is when I think I had probably my, my, my biggest insight, which is just that, that space, when I started, space was, was reserved for, for, for big institutions. It was reserved for places that had the facilities, the infrastructure to put together these big things and NASA, ISRO, ESA, these big space agencies. So around this time, around 2010, it started looking like space may be more accessible. May may, this was still before CubeSats, but, but space, but it was getting easier to go into space. If you can launch a phone into space, a phone you buy off the shelf, if you can launch that into space, then why can't you build your own stuff? And in fact, if you think about it, any country has a rock, has a space program before they have a car industry because automobiles have to work in all sorts of conditions. There's millions of automobiles out there, as I, as I found to my cost today, there's millions of automobiles out there and they work, they work at minus 40, they work at plus 50. They just continue to work. If your automobile fails at the rate that rockets fail, you, you, so, so it's, so you can buy the, you can start, you don't have to have this mystique of space qualified parts of space expertise. It's possible to do things on a lower level, especially if you're not building a 10 billion dollar spacecraft. If you're building a 10 billion dollar spacecraft or even a one billion dollar spacecraft, then a few million dollars spent on components is, is a small investment. But if you're building a one million dollar spacecraft, then maybe you can compromise, maybe you can go mil, mil standard, or maybe you can go industrial grade. So this is what we're doing. And what we started to do was a balloon program. So rather than start immediately with space, because at that time, this, this was, I guess, five or six years ago, that space program still didn't exist. So, so I went to, to, to the director at the time, and I said, let's start this. And he was kind enough to give me some 20 lakhs, probably about 10 to 15 lakhs a year. And we started up a balloon program. So this was a major learning process. Approvals in India for anything are not easy. And getting the balloon approvals was, was a learning process. When we first started getting them, they showed us the, well Srijath and my other student Daksita had gone. And when the first time they went, they, they went to this place in Palace Road. Well, near near the palace, with a paratrooper regiment place, you get a retinal scan, you get your fingerprint, and you go in and then they show you these pages. And those pages are marked confidential. So that, and they said you're not allowed to tell anyone. So you're not allowed to tell anyone about the regulations on how to fly balloons. So finally we got it. And a lot of it we got because we're a government institution. And so now we have these balloon approvals that, that we get. We, we struggled or we, we, it took us a, it was a learning experience figuring out where to get balloons from. First we, we got Chinese balloons that were a little bit larger. We got balloons from Pavan rubber in Pune. Some of the Chinese balloons that we got had been stitched. They, I mean, not originally, the rubber had torn and they, or the latex had torn and they stitched them back together. So now we stick to Pavan balloons which are, which is a pretty, pretty good supplier. They supply balloons worldwide. A lot of the stuff we did, a lot of the electronics we built failed the first four times, five times. And so I had yesterday, I met a bunch of kids from RV college. They want to put together a satellite and they want to do everything for the first time. So I told them, well, maybe I'll get to this later. But, but I told them you can't do anything without, without practice. No matter how good you are, the first time you do anything, especially in, in any stringent, in any stressful environment, it's going to fail. So our balloons fail. So our balloon payloads failed for all sorts of reasons. One time we had been reusing metal rings. And these balloons, they were they're two kg balloons, but they, they pull with like 10 kgs of force. And this metal ring snapped because we had been using the same metal ring for, for three, four times. So it learned a learning experience. Now we only use, we use new equipment every time. Ropes snapped. We went through a cloud. It never occurred to us that if you go through a cloud, you're going to get moisture condensing on all, all your electronics. So these things happen. We don't, we, we put the first time we sent something up, it got too cold. We put it in an insulated box. It got too hot. So now we have a box with a hole in it. Yeah, these are the things you learn. And I believe that without that experience on balloons, I don't believe that we could build the space, the stuff for space that we're building now with any confidence. So now after a little while working on balloons, now we started a lot of it through contacts with random contacts. Some, some of these conferences that, that NP had called me to, we met other people. Now we have a fairly good collaboration with Pesit. And so we're, we're putting together something for Pisat three. We're putting together a small UV payload for Pisat three. And a lot of what we do, we, we, we have where we, we don't want to be doctrinaire about anything. If it makes sense for us to buy, we buy. My, my budget is something like 80 lakhs for three years. So if it makes, if it's affordable, if, if it, I don't want to spend, we're a research institution. It's not my job to rebuild, to build a better mousetrap or build the same mousetrap. I, what we have to do is we have to do something that finally the way we measure ourselves is by publications. And so our stuff has to be good enough to be published in the international journals. When we go to a conference, we should not be ashamed to talk about what we do. So, so that's, that's what we do. We're a research organization. Personally, I believe that if we don't, if we don't do world-class research, there's no point. We have to do research that's comparable to anything else in the world. And because we got in at the early stage of this low cost revolution, I think that we are, we have an advantage. We are getting in on the, on the stuff that we're building is, is at the forefront. We presented at conferences and, and people are interested in what we're doing. So, so now we're building something for Pisat 3. We built a small star camera. And again, we, we thought about it. And we said, let's build something. What is, we want to do it in stages. We don't want to go to very complex things at the beginning, because you start making mistakes. So we start, we start with simple things. We want to go in stages. So we thought and said, what is a simple thing that we can build? It's just a star camera. But how can we make it better? So what we did is we made a small star camera and a cheap star camera. The first star camera that we built is about 5 lakhs. Main cost of that is because we're using a star 1000 CMOS chip. And that's a space qualified chip that's expensive. But then what is a star camera? It's just a camera that looks and gets pictures of stars. That's all. A star camera. But really, it's more than that. Because what's a star sensor, but a star camera? So the way we're selling our, what I'm interested in is the star camera, looking at the stars. What can you do with a small star camera? Well not very much. What you can do is if a supernova goes off, you can get it. So you might stare at a patch of the sky and you look for these transients. You look for a supernovae, you look for flair stars, you look for asteroids coming in. So this is what you do with a star camera. But really, what we're trying to reposition it as is a star sensor. All that a star sensor does is it takes pictures of stars and it converts it, it compares those pictures with a star catalog and you get a position. And so now we're the next generation star sensor that we're doing is much smaller. It's about a half you. This current star sensor is about I guess one and a half you. But our next generation star sensor, which we'll have done in a month or two is a half you. And we're coming in at a total cost of about two lakhs. And so you go out into the market and you see if you can buy a star sensor for under 10 lakhs. I think it's difficult. And so we're also saying that we're trying to put it on team Indus. We're saying that a camera is a camera. We don't have to look at stars. We can look at the moon. We'll take pictures of the moon for you. And we'll do a better job than the commercial star sensor cameras that you buy. So this is the sort of stuff we're doing now. The easiest thing to do was a visible star sensor. So that's what we started with. And there is a lot of interest in getting this out into the into the general market. I had in this this kind of small, cheap things, because now you open up the market for university students. You don't have to spend 10, 15 lakhs to build something. You can do something for one or two lakhs. And so now the next things we're doing is now we're doing things that I'm more directly interested in, which is going back to the ultraviolet. We want to build an ultraviolet star camera. It turns out that if you want to build a useful ultraviolet star camera, then you need to put a micro channel plate. You need to do photon counting stuff. It's not just a standard camera. So this adds a level of complexity. But we think that we were developing our own detectors in-house. So essentially what we think we can do, UVIT was conservatively speaking 40 or 50 crores. We think we can build something that does 60%, 80% of UVIT for under a crore. And that's where we think the market is. That's where we think science is heading. Now, I had a when I had gone to Israel, like I guess about three weeks ago, we had a conference on UVs astronomy. And it looks like the general UV community is moving in two directions. One is towards extremely large missions. After all, what we can do is we can do 30 centimeter mirrors maximum in a cube set. Probably maybe not even 30, maybe 20 centimeter mirrors. So we can only do small mirrors. What they want to do with the next class of UV missions is a 15 meter mirror. So 15 meter meter UV mirror in space. Finally they might come down to a 10 meter mirror. But even so a 10 meter mirror in space, the JWST mirror is six meters. And this will be a 10 billion dollar mission. By the time it flies, which will be 2035 or so, maybe 20 billion dollars. So this is a decadal mission. The other end of the of the scale is missions that are built that they want to build for about five million dollars in CubeSats. And so now there's a CubeSat program that that may go up next year for which they want to spend about five million dollars. And because of current technology, you can do the same thing with the CubeSats of five million dollars that you could have done with a spacecraft of a hundred million dollars of a decade ago. And so this is this is part of where the future is heading. Now, the final thing is that in India, what has happened now is that space has become a sexy thing. So you have all these universities that want to do space projects and they all seem to spend about a crore to do these space projects. And none of them have done anything to date. The satellite, I don't know of any single Indian university satellite that has actually produced data and certainly nothing has produced publishable data. And this is what I think is something that we should break. And I don't know if any of you have university contacts, but I think that if we can do this, if we can get this this market, maybe even get five universities together and spend five crores to build a satellite properly that will do real science. I think that will that will be a good thing. So I know all of you guys are new space or some of you are new space guys. And it's always a different thing for me when I talk with entrepreneurs. They tell me, you know, one crore, that's nothing. Well, my budget for three years is 80 lakhs. And so when Sushmita Sushmita told me, so I said, what do you need? I said, what do you need? I need five crores. Okay, let's talk about it. Here's five crores, no problem. But it's not quite so easy. So let me end there. I hope this was, I told NP, NP himself seems to have run off. And so I told him that my talk would be rambling and not very focused. So I hope I haven't bored you. Thank you. Well, what I would do, say I know astronomy. And so what I would, most of these university satellites, they're meant as advertisements. The universities, I see these boards for Pisat one. Pisat one got what, three pixels. So they're aimed at advertisements. And I think that if they tried to sell them as here we're doing great science, I think it would work for the university. I think it would work for the students. The university needs it. University needs it for UGC. They get points for all this. And so here is something where it's really a win-win situation. Now the problem with DST funding is the problem with funding from anywhere, one crore is not so hard to get for three years. That's what I get. If you want to go, when I went for DST the first time, I had actually gone for six crores. And so what they told me was, well, this particular committee can't recommend more than one crore. If you want, you can go on to the next committee. But if you want, you cut your budget down to one crore and we'll give you the money right now. And so I felt that one crore in the hand was better than five crores in the ether somewhere. So I said, okay, I'll just take one crore. But yes, but this all depends on the poll that people have. You know, this is the real world. If you know Venkainidu, you can go to Venkainidu and get MPL, MPLAD funds or something. I mean, you know, I don't know, I'm just... I know. There are a lot of funds. There are a lot of funds and we don't want that much. But I don't know how to get it. So this is what I would say. I would say, let's do the best science that we can. Are these guys at RV College? They had come yesterday for our competition and they want to do some biology experiment on a spacecraft. And I told them, I told them it's not going to do anything. They weren't very happy with me, especially one guy he said, no, no, if we don't do, how do we learn? But you've got statistics. There have been 10 satellites and zero have done anything. IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay, Anna University. Nothing, nothing has worked. Why? You're going to do exactly the same thing. You know, what is the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? So I think that if, I mean, I'm trying to, anytime anyone comes and talks to me, I tell them, why don't we work together? You focus on building the satellite. That's not very difficult. You'll teach you a lot. Let us give you the payload. I think so, I think, but again, universities everywhere, they have a different mindset. The mindset in general in CubeSats is not to do science. It's a demonstration. It's a technology demonstrator. I think in general, anywhere. I think NASA is trying to break this now. And this is actually my biggest, this is the reason I'm a little passionate about this is because I think it's an opportunity cost. I think by being too conservative, by our institutions, by ISRO being too conservative, by our institutions being too conservative, IAA. There's no reason that IAA can't give five crores for this, but we're not. We're too conservative to do that. DST, there's no reason that DST can't push this instead of that Gaumata stuff or whatever. Push, push this. So it's an opportunity cost. We're falling behind. We have a chance to be in the forefront. And these universities are wasting that chance. They have the money. They have the manpower and they're wasting it. The problem with the shuttle was the man part of it. Orion is coming up. Orion has missed every deadline to date. And so when it will fly, I don't know. If you believe Elon Musk, you'll have man flight in two weeks. There's, I think that the space agents, there are things that no private company can do. As we found with the Google X Prize, they had thought that they could get to the moon within $30 million. It's not possible. Elon Musk is finding this out. He's getting huge amounts of NASA money. And it's, so the research part of it, I think has to be done by governments. The routine stuff, lofting a communication satellite up. I don't think Astro should be doing that. I don't think Astro should be, I think they should subcontract the PSLV business and get out of that. Do the new stuff. Do the human space flight. Well, there had been a lot of interest in when I put in a proposal, Astro had had a call for spacecraft. And I had put in a proposal in about 2007 or so. And because I was used to this American style of getting contractors to do it, I actually managed to tie up with L&T. They were very interested in getting into space. And so I went up and I met all the way up to, this is named the chief guy, LM Naik, is it? I went all the way up, I met all of them and they put in a solid proposal. And Astro was not interested. So I know they were interested. I know this Nagarjuna was interested in building a space construction plant. But what happened is that they went to the chairman. The chairman said, yes, you can do it. And then people down below said, well, I want one crore to get this design out. So that's the problem. I think now they're trying. But again, now if you look, all the people who get contracts are friends and relations. Again, I don't know if MP will like me telling this story, but the first time I met him was in Kospar in Mysore. And I don't know why he, how he had heard of me, but he came and talked to me. He caught me and he caught talk to me. And he said, I'm thinking of, I'm just finishing from this, what Erasmus-Mundis program. And I want to start up a space company in India. And I told him, I said, it's a good idea, but getting the contracts will be tough. You have to know people in Astro. You have to know people in DRDO. And I guess he tried many things. He was? Godridge Aerospace. You know, I don't even think that that's necessary. I think that rocket, I think that building a rocket is not that difficult. You'll make mistakes, sure. But it's not that difficult. I bet that if Astro just gave someone, as NASA has done with Elon Musk, you just give someone a contract for 10 years. You'll get it done. 10 years is too much. You give people a contract for three years. They'll do it. In Astro. The people I have worked with in Astro have been outstanding. I think that what happens is that they get to be conservative. The culture gets to be conservative. And I think it's the same thing. Everyone is afraid to make mistakes. I think that's the main issue. Because if you make a mistake, then you know what might happen. An RTI might come. You wasted a million dollars. I mean, we do this, right? We buy equipment. And some of the equipment that we buy, we don't use. We thought we wanted it, but it turns out when we got it, we had already moved past it because it takes six months to get. Or it's not exactly what we wanted. And so people are, we're small people. The amount of money we waste, quote unquote, is small. Astro, if you're spending 10 crores, maybe people have a right to question how you spend your money. But they haven't got money yet. They got the Twitters. It's done partly by, you got done partly by this ICTS in Bangalore. Rahul Narayan, I mean, he met Modi at the Silicon Valley thing. And Modi was very encouraging. But they still, it took them still two years after that before they got their launch contract. No, I agree. I think the biggest problem is that the way that a NASA project works is that when they decide at the beginning, this project will be $50 million or $100 million, $150 million. Whatever it is, that's the money you get, right? And then you have a contract. So you get so much money at different phases and you have different reviews at different phases. But once they give you the money, they don't micromanage. And that money is guaranteed. Once you get that money, as long as you meet your phases, you get it. And if you have cost overruns and they are satisfied with your reasoning for your cost overruns, they'll give you the overruns. But I've been seeing the way that all these big projects work, TMT, LIGO, the money takes forever to come. And when it comes, it still seems to come with strings. If I would compare with the Chinese, I look at the Chinese TMT program. They have, they staffed an institute with engineers. And so now when they want to work, when they want to propose for new mission, new telescopes, they have engineers there who are doing nothing, who have time to build things. We have not built that infrastructure. We have this tendency to think that we're smarter than everyone else. And so one Indian can do the job of 10 Chinese or Americans or whoever. We also have another problem, which is that we believe in, we don't believe in expertise. We believe that you can take an IAS officer out of here and plug her into here, tax to farming. And there'll be, there's no expertise involved. They're just good. And we do that in science. So I think that's the differences I see. Yeah, but no, but there, I think you have to be careful. I mean, I'll tell you what you are out said about that. But the thing about the Mars mission, it's a $70 million mission, but we're not doing full cost accounting. In NASA missions, you do full cost accounting. Since 1980, when I joined, when I was an NRC had got it, that's when they started doing full cost accounting. So all the civil servants had to start finding, they had to fill out these time sheets for where they were working on. But that was about 1990. So they pay for salaries. The Mars mission, they didn't pay account for salaries. Significant part of any mission. The second thing is that when you compare it with the Mars observer, the Mars observer is a billion dollar mission, but it does science. So you are all I had, I was in there for some review. And he came and sat with me for lunch. And he was complaining that none of the Mars experiments did anything. Was it? Really? Really? But they've got some good pictures, right? I thought they had, the people on the Viking, when the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars, they didn't want a camera because cameras don't give you any science. But Carl Sagan said, you'll be sorry if the Martian giraffe walks by and you don't see it. So that's why they had a camera on the Viking mission. Well, essentially that's what a star camera is. It is a telescope. It's a small telescope. So now what we're doing is, so that's where we built a one-U, maybe one and a half-U. Now we want to go down to a half-U. And but on the other end, we want to build larger ones. So maybe two to three-U. The NASA ones are six-U and they're talking of doing 12-U. And when you do 12-U, I don't know if it's a CubeSat anymore, but that's what they're thinking of doing. When you're on the ground, you have all these layers of the atmosphere. So you start with water, nitrogen, ozone. So really you need to be about the ozone layer to do good things. Plus the sky is bright in itself because of all this reflected sunlight. So what we want to do is we want to go outside the atmosphere. Once you go outside the atmosphere, then you're going to do new science anyway. But what we'd like to do is we'd like to go down to about 20, 23rd magnitude, which you can do with a small UV telescope. And again, just stare at places. So now when you stare at places in the UV, you get things that you don't get in the ground. So what you'd like to do is to get a supernova. If you stare at a large enough piece of the sky for long enough, you'll have a supernova there. And so you'd like to get it from immediately after it flashes. So that's the kind of science we'd like. We try to do about, we can't do anything now. So we're stuck from, I guess, beginning of June to September. We try to do it about every month and a half. The trouble with our balloon launches is we're happy to, anyone who wants to come and see it, we're happy to have them come and see. But we don't have the manpower to support universities in, we don't want to become a balloon launching service. We don't have that manpower. It's not our mandate. We want to do our own science with balloons. So that's the main problem. If someone comes to us and says, we have something we'd like to launch, if it's possible, we'll do it within our limitations. Yeah, but because of our own constraints. So we have constraints on the launch. The launch can only be on Sundays between two and four in the morning because of all the airports around. BIAL, they have so many flights that they only want us to launch at that time. So because of all these constraints, if it were a matter of just saying we can launch anytime, then perhaps it would be easier. And then once we launch, then we have to chase the balloon down. And so that's another major undertaking. The students, they chase after the balloon. They start at two in the morning when as soon as the balloon goes up. And by the time the balloon comes down, it's five or six. So it's a major time investment for us that we don't have the manpower to support. I think it would be a good idea. But we just can't support that. What we've, we actually had higher hopes from our balloon program when we started. We thought we would do much better science. It turns out that balloon limitations don't let you do real good science, at least for our small UV payloads. And so the other problem is just getting permissions. It's a hassle. But I think that in general, I think that there are good things that they could do with balloons that might, if they can go through with the hassle of getting the permissions and all, I think they could do it. Again, yeah. Again, in often what happens is that if no one knows what you're doing, you're okay. I know this is true with drones where they fly drones in remote areas. So yeah, it might be okay. As long as you're far from any air pads, still better to get permission. And I think it's possible, but it's just there's that initial one, one and a half years that you would have to spend. I've never been convinced of this deorbiting mechanisms. I mean, they'll come down anyway in a year or two, right? If the lower stuff, the small stuff. So I don't know. And you know that deorbiting mechanisms won't work. That's good. The problem is again, people don't have an understanding of the way science works. You can't just take a bunch of undergraduate students and expect to build a good science payload. You can build a payload. It'll be like the ants on the space station. They send ants up and so what? Can they build their nest upside down or without gravity? I mean, I don't know. I don't care. So you do a lot of stuff. And I think I would personally, personally I think that most of these colleges are engineering colleges and most of them would gain more from building the satellite than the payload. I don't think that the payload would, payload you have to worry about so many other things. I think the bus is what they would rather get more building. I think it's counterproductive. I think so, I think so. I had talked to the chairman about three or four years ago and he had this, I wanted to say if we build something, can we fly it? And he was saying that ISRO wants to have a proposal mechanism where they have developed a bus, where they want to develop a bus for these things. So maybe this is related to that. Have they? So they'll have a proposal mechanism at some point. No, balloons are, there are a couple of. CubeSat payloads. CubeSat payloads. Yeah, we're looking into that. We would, we heard, we bought our CubeSat from interorbital. We paid about $5,000? $10,000. And it seems like, it seems like for another three or $4,000, they'll give us a launch. So maybe that's possible. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That would be, I think, cost of the 16-2,000 participating in balloons are kind of problems. The payloads are getting at the start because of capital, so, actually obtaining those. Yeah. Yeah. No, that was from when we bought them. This is what my students have been saying, that when we bought it, they said that if we pay another three or $4,000, we can get a launch of their CubeSat. If we can, it's great. We used, no, we used their CubeSat. We bought their CubeSat and for a little extra money. But I agree, I thought it was much more. And, you know, $40,000, I can't afford $40,000. But I thought they were all still around this $30,000. No? No. Is it free, is it? Okay. That in itself makes a huge difference. Okay. I'll get a test for anything that you've written for our students. Yeah. No, you're, yeah. Okay. What is the limitation? Well, the limitation is with the balloons we use. We buy two or 3,000 rupee balloons from Pavan. And they, they're very inconsistent. You know, everyone says that balloons go up to 100,000 feet. I don't believe that. We get up to 28, 29 kilometers. We've not really, I think we went up to 32 once. But these balloons are so inconsistent. Some of them burst. We had one balloon burst 10 minutes after launch. Identical balloons. So I think that's the main constraint. We, in September or in November or December, we want to have a flight on one of the TIFR balloons. And those are stitched balloons. And they have gone up to 50 kilometers. So once you go up that high, then you can start doing more science. We are, we built a pointing mechanism, but that's still heavy. We're limited in weight that we can carry. We're, our payloads have to be under five, six KG. So if you're trying to stabilize a three KG telescope, you need a pointing mechanism that's also comparable. Yeah. Yeah. So we're having troubles with that. We have one now that will probably give us to, within about half a degree, which is good enough if you have a wide field of view. We were very naive the first time. We want to, we wanted to catch comet Ison. And so we tried it with a pointing mechanism. And it was a disaster from start to end. We, we saw the telescopes going wildly all over the place. I, this is, you know, they tried this with, with, with NGST, with the James Webb Space Telescope. What they thought is that they manage everything out. You do everything on paper first. And if you do everything on paper first, then you save at the end. And because they had so much development built into the JWST, it worked out to be much more expensive. There is increasing pressure on basic research. The, the government, I mean, not just this government for the last 10 years, increasingly there's a push to become self-sufficient. And you will see that in increasing fees in universities, IST, the fees are going up, ITs, the fees are going up. So one of the things is you, you get money. For an institute like us where we do basic research, we don't have that fun generation capacity. And so it's not entirely clear how important anyone thinks that basic research is worldwide. In India, I think it's a little bit worse, but it's not clear how important anyone thinks basic research is. And so that, that's going to be a problem, I think. The jobs, there's, there's no shortage of jobs in the country for anyone with a PhD, but having a PhD doesn't mean you, you too, you're a good scientist. The balloons, the space balloon challenge, I don't remember. No, we weren't accepted. We didn't, we're not going there. Yeah. Oh, I see. Yeah. What, what I tell my students and, and they don't believe me is that the research environment has become significantly more stressful. Over the last, since I finished my PhD in that because the, there are fewer jobs than there used to be, there are people who work extremely hard. And we're competing. We have a tendency. I mean, generally, I think we have a tendency to compete against our peers, meaning our neighbors. And our peers are not as good as we are. And our peers are not our neighbors. Our peers are the people sitting at midnight in some campus in Germany or in the U.S. And that, that I think is the biggest difference that we have. When, when I look at the student life, I believe that it's too easy, that it doesn't encourage the, the dedication. I mean, it's unhealthy. It shouldn't be this way. I think we drive people away. I think it's especially hard on women, because many times the, the, the early career women are when you have to start making life choices. And, and in, in astronomy, that, that becomes very, very difficult. It's a very unhealthy environment. But this is the reality. The reality is that you just cannot survive unless you put in 60 hours a week. I put in, I put in, now I time it. I tried toggle. So I timed myself with toggle. And I put in regularly 45 hours a week. And I feel that I work, that I don't put in enough time. And yet I feel I also work harder than any of my students. So, so they're sitting here. But, but I think this is the biggest thing. I think that it's a very hard thing to appreciate unless you're in, unless you're in, unless you see people around you who are working till two in the morning. These are the benchmarks. Now these days people very often, students very often have five papers before they get their PhD. They've been on a, they, they, they get on, on a major proposal. Very hard to get a faculty position unless you had a Hubble fellowship or a Chandra fellowship. So it's, it's much more difficult. In India now we have a lifeline, which is all the universities. So as long as you have a PhD, you can get a job at a university. We're looking at 30 arc seconds. 30 arc seconds. If you, it depends on the market you want to hit. If you want to get a one arc second, if you want to get a tenth of an arc second, then you have to pay so much more. But in the, in those cameras of our class, we're about fifth of the price. 20% of the price. Where we've, well, no, we say I'm not a, I'm not a commercial organization. And so we don't have that, we don't have that mechanism. If I wanted to commercialize it myself, I would have to find a mechanism to do it. You know, in ISC it took them 10 years to start commercializing their products. And, and so I don't want to do that. It's not, it's not what I chose to be. Yes, that would be the goal. That would be, that would be nice. Yeah. No, I agree, I agree. It's just that, it's just that I don't want to, I mean, you choose what you want to do. I chose to go into science. I chose not to become a CEO. Yes, sure. We're looking into ways. The students, maybe some of the students might start doing it once they finish. So we'll look into it. What we do right now, everything we do is out in the open literature. We don't have any secrets. But yes, putting it together is still not, not trivial. I mean, like, like red hat, right? That's how they make their money. So, so yeah. So yes, we're, we're looking into ways to do it. But I don't want to do it. So one of the things that I wanted to understand that as an Indian working in the space industry in US, you also worked on a couple of different projects, DOD projects. But then that industry is so heavily ITAR regulated that Indians, for say, cannot get jobs. So was there a cultural divide or was there some kind of a prejudice that you saw in the community over there like you were working or was it more welcoming or equally welcoming as over here? I think ITAR has become a much bigger deal after, after about 2000. After that, there was that Chinese spy scandal with who was it? Hughes was it? Where they were provided, maybe Lockheed. Anyway, they sort of were supplying pointing guidance equipment to the Chinese. After that, that was in 1995, 96. After that, ITAR became much stricter. But also, I was working at a university. At a university, you're not allowed to do classified research. And so, so anything I was doing was okay. Also, ITAR only applies to people who are not Greenheart card holders. And so, it's fine. But there, it is a problem now because some of these places, they have science teams sent to be international. But now, if they have international communities, they're not allowed to talk about some things like detectors in open meetings. I've had meetings where I've had presentations It does. It doesn't. I think it hurts American companies because you get, I had a, I was back in 2000, I was trying to get a detector from an American company. And the first thing it was, it was just a lab detector. First thing it went through Department of Commerce. And then the person who was handling it, she had to take maternity leave. And so that files was stuck for six months. And then after she came back, it then got transferred over to state. And the guy told me, he said, I know him. So he said, you know, I'm a small company. I just can't deal with this paperwork. Do you mind canceling the order? Cancel the order. I got it from a British company instead. But not as good. A different kind of detector. What do you see? India as a country has been enthusiastic towards it. And we see a lot of small companies popping up. Do you see a potential where they'll be able to grow? Is there enough acceptance of critical mass to whatever they need to do? I think that there are a lot of companies doing a lot of innovative things. And I think those companies will do well. I think if the companies that depend on contracts with ISRO or DRDO, I think those are going to be much more difficult. Especially the hardware contracts. Those are, I think, going to be tougher. I think the ways to use a lot of the, there's a lot of stuff already available, especially the data. You figure out new ways to do that. I think that those companies will survive. Trying to sell to the Indian space market. I think you have to sell to the international market. First thing is a company having an audacity to do that. You know, I've been involved with Team Indus, not deeply, but I've been involved with them for the last, what, four years. And our own balloon program. It just seems like the regulations are moving slowly. If I see the drone regulations, I think a lot of it. It seems to me that a lot of it moves slower than the innovation. They don't keep up. But you know, I'm not the right person to ask about that. I do open research. None of the stuff that I do, I don't look to make money. What I would really like to see are some more hackathons. I think especially with raspberry pies and just put them out and let kids work. I'd like to see universities doing that. Thank you guys. I hope you guys enjoyed it. So do come and join us. I think this will go up on the NUAA page as well as on the India page on Facebook. And it will be also shared.