5th November 2009
D.Raghunandan

The first new US rocket or launch vehicle since the Space Shuttle, and indeed in terms of launch technology the first new rocket from any country in the past thirty years, was launched in a test flight from Cape Canaveral last week on October 31. The Ares I-X prototype is part of the next generation human space launch architecture designed to replace the ageing Space Shuttles that are due to retire next year. The new architecture, named Constellation and designed for travel beyond near-earth space, is slated to comprise two new rockets, the Ares-I to launch astronauts and a heavy-lift Ares-V to carry cargo and different payloads. The idea is that Ares-I would place the Orion crew capsule (successor to the aircraft-like Shuttle) in low-earth orbit, while the larger Ares-V would ferry the Altair landing craft to dock with Orion and fire rocket engines to take the crew capsule and lander on to the moon or even beyond, for instance to Mars.

The Ares I-X prototype lifted off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on 28th October and spent just 2 minutes in powered flight and 6 minutes in all from lift-off till it had jettisoned the mock but accurate replica crew capsule and upper portions in space and the reusable booster engine had splashed down in the ocean about 200 kilometres away. The test launch had been postponed for a few days due to bad weather --- a continuing irony that shows the limitations even of ever-advancing space technologies --- but, despite a partial parachute failure resulting in the booster having a hard landing in the sea and getting quite badly dented, was eventually declared a success.

Considering that the entire design exercise of the new rocket, the first new development in rocketry for several decades, was initiated just 3 years ago in 2006, one cannot fault that description. Yet, several questions loom over not just the new Ares I rocket itself or the supposedly next generation Constellation architecture, but over the entire programme of human space exploration by the USA and NASA. Even as the test launch was proceeding, a high-powered White House Committee was submitting its report on the future of US manned space flight and the technologies required for it. The Report raised many important issues including about whether or not the Ares I design should at all be pursued, prompting many to wonder whether this maiden test flight might not be its last. Since the US runs by far the world’s largest space programme, useful lessons would undoubtedly be learnt by other space-faring nations, including newcomers such as India which has announced and is now planning manned missions to the Moon, from this Report as well as how NASA views the development of the new technology.

The Ares Rockets         Ares is the Greek god of war, a pseudonym for Mars, which NASA considered an appropriate name for the new rocket, symbolic of NASA’s  future plans since the rocket was designed specifically for longer-duration space travel, for instance to the red planet. The numerical designations of “I” and “V” are tributes to past rockets that helped NASA blaze a trail in human space exploration, the Saturn I and Saturn V rockets that respectively took US astronauts first to low-earth orbits and then to the Moon.

The Ares-I’s booster engine with solid fuel is directly derived from the Shuttle’s booster rocket. However, given the configuration of the Ares I, it was decided not to use the Space Shuttle Main Engine for the subsequent expendable liquid-fuel stages but a J2-X engine modified from the J2 engines that had powered the Apollo series Saturn rockets. The decision to build upon the basic Shuttle and Apollo technologies was deliberate and sought to economize on both production and launch facilities costs, while also reducing development time especially with regard to safety which is of paramount concern in designing human flight machines. The Ares’ solid booster engine has more payload-carrying power and acceleration than the Shuttle’s engine. Ares I can place more than 25 tonnes in low-earth orbit compared with the Shuttle’s ????, and is the most powerful rocket engine in use today. The main new feature of the liquid oxygen-hydrogen fuelled J2X engines is that, unlike the Shuttle’s engines which required to be started on the ground at launch itself, they are designed to be started in mid-air or near-vacuum, conditions that the crew capsule would encounter in low-earth orbits from where it needs to be powered onwards, say to the moon as in the Apollo series.

The Ares I is thus a pencil-like vehicle with the liquid-fuel engines and upper stages sitting on top of the solid booster, while the Orion crew capsule, emergency escape mechanism and the launch abort system sitting atop in that order. It stands 327 feet tall, almost twice the height of the Shuttle but short of the Saturn V’s 363 feet. The description “skinny” is almost invariably used in write-ups about the Ares I.   
The launch abort system, sitting atop the crew capsule, is another important innovation. This system is specifically designed to try and save the crew in the eventuality of having to abort the launch at any one of three stages viz. on the pad or upto 25,000 feet, at mid-altitudes up to around 150,000 feet and during final ascent up to around 300,000 feet. The system is a fully and independently equipped pod with its own ejector and directional motors designed to instantaneously separate the crew capsule from the rocket below, take the capsule away from the rocket which is presumed to be burning or otherwise malfunctioning and then deploy parachutes to enable a soft landing. The most dangerous time for space crews is during launch when immense power and intense heat is being generated below them and, if anything goes wrong at that stage including even a shut-down of all systems causing the rocket to come crashing back to the land, the probability of the crew losing their lives has been put by NASA at 100 per cent. The abort system has been tasked to reduce these odds to reasonable but not great odds of 1 in 10! Incidentally, the legendary German rocket scientist Wehrner von Braun, designer of the V-1 and V-2 rockets that wreaked destruction on England during World War II and who led NASA’s design team that built the Saturn rockets, believed that solid booster rocket engines were simply too powerful and unsafe for human flight!

No future for Ares I?        But even as Ares I was on the launch pad just days before lift-off, an authoritative and influential Report was released, raising questions about its future. The Augustine Committee, named after its Chairman Norman Augustine, retired aerospace engineer and chief executive at renowned military and aerospace major Lockheed Martin, had been set up under the previous Bush administration to go into the proposed return of the US to the Moon by 2020 and the Constellation programme tasked with this goal.  

For NASA of course, which had not built a new spacecraft in over thirty years and which some critics said had lost the necessary capabilities, the Ares I project has been of enormous significance. NASA saw the Ares I-X as a “pathfinder” vehicle, a chance for NASA to re-acquire design-development expertise and, in the words of a mission leader, “remind ourselves of what it takes to build a vehicle.”


The Augustine panel, however, saw things differently. "With time and sufficient funds, NASA could develop, build and fly the Ares I successfully… the question is, should it?" The panel noted that NASA’s budget had been drastically and continually cut, even after the announcement of the “return to the moon” programme, and found a serious mismatch between goals and available funding. The Committee therefore found itself having to question the goals themselves, and also having to recommend several technology options that could operate within the funds available. Only one of the seven options underscored by the panel included Ares I.

The Augustine panel felt that, while the craft itself was good, the cost, development time and its role within the Constellation programme were open to question.  In essence, the Committee leaned to the view that, rather than using a leap-frog approach using Ares I till near-earth orbit and then going on to the Moon or Mars with the heavy lift Ares V, it would make more sense to use a single craft such as Ares V with a “lite” or cargo version being used for missions that ended at the Space Station or with placing payloads in earth orbits. The panel also favoured looking more closely at other vehicle designs including Shuttle variants. An expert opined that the favourable consideration of so many options itself spelt doom for Ares I.
Some members of the panel and other experts closely involved with its work however felt this was not the end of the day for Ares I. One senior panelist, who had worked with von Braun on almost every rocket made in the Huntsville facility, felt that examining various alternatives was part of any mission and that Ares I may still be retained as the best choice. But the more important thing, he felt, was that “a mission has to be better defined, and then a rocket has to be built for that. You can't design a rocket for an open-ended mission of 'go to [the space] station' or 'return to the moon.'."

Goals and means of space exploration        And therein lies the rub. What should be the goals of space exploration? And what means should best be adopted to achieve them? The Augustine Committee has raised many relevant issues, for the US of course but also for other nations to ponder over.

The Report clearly felt that destination-specifics such as the Moon, Mars etc were putting the cart before the horse. “Planning for a human spaceflight program should begin with a choice about its goals, rather than a choice of possible destinations. Destinations should derive from goals, and alternative architectures may be weighed against those goals. There is now a strong consensus [in the United States] that the next step in human spaceflight is to travel beyond low-Earth orbit. This should carry important benefits to society, including driving technological innovation, developing commercial industries and important national capabilities, and contributing to our expertise in further exploration. Human exploration can contribute appropriately to the expansion of scientific knowledge… and it is in the interest of both science and human spaceflight that a credible and well-rationalized strategy of coordination between them be developed.”

The Panel felt that the present US space programme was not geared towards these goals, was unsustainable in its present form and, with misplaced goals, did not have the budgets with which to achieve them.

Most importantly perhaps, the Augustine Committee Report, noting that other nations too have space programmes cumulatively comparable to that of the US, states that while human spaceflight objectives should broadly align with key [US] national objectives, “significant accomplishments could follow [from] actively engaging international partners in a manner adapted to today’s multi-polar world [to] strengthen geopolitical relationships, leverage global financial and technical resources, and enhance the exploration enterprise.” After all, the Report emphasizes, the broader goal of space programmes and especially human spaceflight is the goal “to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers, to shape human perceptions of our place in the universe…, [and ultimately] to chart a path for human expansion into the solar system.” A far cry indeed from chauvinistic goals and show-piece missions that characterized the US’ own space missions in the 60s and 70s, and is yet to be truly seen pervading the spirit of space programmes of most countries.

November 01, 2009

Prabir Purkayastha



THE telecom spectrum scam is now back in the news with CBI raiding the Department of Telecom (DoT), reportedly at the request of the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC). The CVC had earlier written to the Department of Telecom on this issue and had made clear that it was not satisfied at the explanation given by DoT. Why the minister concerned, who has self-admittedly been the key figure in this entire exercise, should be outside the investigations of the CBI is the key question. Is it merely an exercise to find some lowly scapegoats and thereby divert attention from the real figures?

If the minister continues to be in charge, he will obviously try and thwart the investigations. Even the prime minister has already given a clean chit to the minister, making CBI investigations even more difficult.

To recapitulate the spectrum swindle, the all India license and the spectrum for additional cellular operators (2G operators) was given away on a first-come-first-served basis at 2001 prices. TRAI, experts within and outside the government, had all stated then that there was no justification for using 2001 prices when there were barely 4 million mobile subscribers as against 300 million subscribers in 2007. Sitaram Yechury wrote to the prime minister on this issue (letter dated 29 February, 2008) cautioning the government that this was simply giving a huge largesse to new operators.

Soon after this sale, the parties who had secured the licenses sold it at about 6-7 times the price they had paid without doing any development at all. The difference between what the companies paid --   a total of Rs 9,000 crore -- and what the market price of these licenses were -- anything between Rs 60,000 to 100,000 crore -- is the scam, making it by far the biggest scam ever in this country.

Who were the companies that benefited from this award of licenses? There were nine corporate entities who secured 120 licenses, which benefited from this under-valuation of the license fees -- Unitech Builders, Venugopal Dhoot’s Videocon, Swan Telecom, Loop Telecom (reportedly owned by Ruias), S Tel, an unknown company owned by a shadowy entity Telecom Investments (Mauritius) Ltd and older players such as Shyam Telelink,, Idea Cellular, Spice and Tatas. Only a few of these were telecom companies or had any real interest in telecom.

The deals struck soon after between UAE’s telecom operator Etisalat and Swan Telecom, and that between Unitech and Talenor (of Norway), brought out the magnitude of the under-valuation.  Swan Telecom sold 45 per cent of its stake to Etisalat for $900 million, taking its book value to $ 2 billion (Rs 10,000 crore). This is without putting up any infrastructure, let alone actually starting operations. The Unitech-Talenor (of Norway) deal was no different: it sold 60 per cent of its stake to Talenor for Rs 6,120 crores while paying only Rs 1,651 crore as license fee. Thus, the new entrants secured licenses for Rs 1,651 that were being valued in excess of Rs 10,000 crore by the market within a few months of their securing the licenses!

A Raja, the minister concerned, has provided two defences to the charge that his actions led to a huge loss to the exchequer. One is the argument that he had no alternative as first-come-first-served was some kind of internal law that all telecom ministers had to obey and all his predecessors had also followed. He has not referred to any document or policy which suggests that all new licenses had to be given only on a first-come-first-served basis. As we will show below, both the TRAI and officials in the Department of Telecom had in fact suggested a bidding procedure for award of licenses. The second argument that Raja has advanced is that the license fee of Rs 1,651 crore was somehow written in stone by TRAI, a contention that TRAI has since denied.

ABSURD ARGUMENT

Let us look at this absurd first-come-first-served argument. The minister has referred to National Telecom Policy (NTP) 99 and the TRAI recommendations of 2003 to justify his first-come-first-served principle. The simple fact is that after NTP 99, there was an auction in 2001 for the 4th GSM license and therefore referring to NTP 99 for justifying this principle does not hold water. In fact, the DoT had referred this matter to TRAI and TRAI had recommended in June 23, 2000 that a multi-stage bidding process be followed with auctioning for the license fee, which is what was finally followed.  Secondly, the 2003 TRAI recommendations regarding first-come-first-served principle that Raja talks about, referred to those parties who had secured licenses and were awaiting spectrum and not to issuance of new licenses. What the minister is deliberately obfuscating here is that in India, we have bundled the spectrum with the license and not auctioned them separately. So giving spectrum on a first-come-first-served basis to parties that have already secured licenses is quite different from that of award of new licenses and spectrum on a first-come-first-served basis.

The then TRAI chairman Nripen Mishra had had rebutted the minister’s claim that TRAI had recommended first-come-first-served with 2001 pieces and clarified their recommendations had asked that new entrants be brought in through a multi stage bidding process. The  TRAI’s recommendations in “Review of License Terms and Conditions and Number of Access Providers” dated August 28, 2008, in para 2.73, had made clear:

The allocation of spectrum is after the payment of entry fee and the grant of license. The entry fee as it exists today is in fact price discovered through a market based mechanism applicable for the grant to the 4th cellular operator. In today’s dynamism and unprecedented growth of the telecom sector, the entry fee determined then is not the realistic price for obtaining a license.

On both counts then, Raja’s defence that he was merely following what TRAI had told him or earlier ministers had done bears no credibility.

But this is not all. There was a detailed note prepared in 2007 by the secretary telecom, DS Mathur, which had evaluated three options regarding award of licenses. It had considered first-come-first-served with 2001 license fee, and two different ways of auctioning the licenses/spectrum. The note also made clear that the first-come-first-served basis with an old license fee was not the best way of giving out licenses and made no reference to this so-called iron rule of giving licenses on a first-come-first-served basis that Raja keeps talking about. It is interesting to note that as long as DS Mathur was the secretary, no licenses were issued and only after his retirement in December 2007, were the new licenses issued.


NO TAKERS FOR MINISTER’S DEFENCE

Raja has also made another claim in his defence. This is that he broke the cartel of telecom operators. If this were so, then the consumer should have seen his telecom bills drop. This has not happened. What Raja has achieved is that he has enlarged the telecom cartel with his favourite companies.

The claim that he has broken the telecom cartel has also another problem. If his defence is that he was only following existing policy and TRAI recommendations, he cannot take credit for his actions – according to him, he had no other choice. So he is either responsible for taking a decision to break the telecom cartel, and therefore also directly responsible for the loss to the exchequer or he is responsible for merely following existing procedures. He cannot have it both ways.

The other element of the scam is the license terms and conditions. If there was indeed a genuine desire to keep license fees low and thereby benefit the ultimate customer, there should have been strict clauses locking-in share-holding and sale of licenses. Not only was this not done, the Merger and Acquisition Guidelines issued by DoT on 22 April, 2008 superseding its earlier guidelines, deliberately omitted all mention of acquisitions and only talked of mergers. The ministry seems to have gone out of its way to facilitate the immediate selling of these licenses for speculative gains. Without any lock-in measures, the gross undervaluation of the spectrum could only lead to windfall profits for the new licensees.

The first-come-first-served policy for award of licenses was further compounded by entirely arbitrary operation of even this principle. The cut off dates for submission of applications were announced with only a 72 hour notice; an entirely new date for capping the applicants were chosen without any basis; and the awards of licenses were made in a free-for-all melee, in which the parties depositing the cheques earlier were given preference. The media reports then talked of CEOs of companies, who were in the know of this capricious principle, coming to Sanchar Bhavan with bouncers to elbow out other competitors and jumping the queue. Never before have we seen such an unedifying spectacle in the award of licenses in the telecom sector. The entire exercise was one of playing favourites and not awarding licenses in an open and transparent manner.

Even after the scam had come to light, the UPA government had made no move to stop this open loot of the public exchequer. The CPI(M) had demanded a set of immediate measures by which licenses given at such low prices should be locked-in for a specified period. It had also asked that windfall tax should be levied on all such sale of licenses. On both these counts, the UPA government then took the position that this was a corporate issue and the government had no role to play, never mind the fact that they were the ones who had issued licenses at such ridiculously low prices.

It is time that the minister concerned and the government take note that their defence on the spectrum issue has no takers. Raja must go if this government is even half-way serious of addressing the issue of probity in public life.

October 18, 2009

Prabir Purkayastha



A RECENT study by scientists from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and Harvard has come out with a set of findings about the nature of the ancestral Indian population. The study  -- Reconstructing Indian population history (Nature, 24 September 2009 | doi:10.1038/nature08365) -- is not a sharp break with the past as some of the newspaper reports have reported but very much in line with past studies. Roughly, the study shows that the Indian population is an admixture of an Ancient South Indian (ASI) and a slightly younger Ancient North Indian (ANI) population. The proportion of the two varies, roughly from south to north, with the North Indian population being closer to the Euro-Asian population outside India. They have also found, similar to the results of an earlier study that the Euro-Asian component is higher in the higher castes.

Another interesting find in the study is that the Onge group in Andaman, who number today in only a few hundreds, is much more closely related to the ASI population and must have broken off before the ANI population appears in India. The other striking result is that there is a scheduled caste-scheduled tribe continuum, something that DD Kosambi had proposed in his seminal work on Indian history.

The major difference of this study with the earlier ones is the amount of data they used in the study. While the other studies had looked at only a few genetic markers in the samples of the people they had taken, this study uses a much higher number of markers.

How do we study genetic variations in a population? Some of the genes in our DNA sequence have multiple forms that they exist in and the alternate forms are called alleles. This means that within the human genetic sequence, there are different expressions of the genes that produce differences within the population. For example, one form of this gene (or allele) produces brown eyes, the other green.  A gene is a DNA sequence within the genome and each Nucleotide is a specific location within this DNA sequence. If the DNA sequence is looked on as a ladder, each location is like a rung coded from its basic building blocks in this DNA ladder. If a nucleotide has only two forms -- there is a single mutation in a nucleotide -- we call these single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The variation of the SNPs in a population is a measure of the genetic diversity of the population.

Most of these different versions of the nucleotides do not lead to any difference in the people – these differences are neutral. The SNPs that display functional differences are only about 1per cent of the total 10 million SNPs that exist in the human population. Although the DNA sequences of any two unrelated people differ by only a small amount – less than 0.1per cent -- this small amount of genetic material can provide insights into ancient migrations and origins of the current populations.

The current study differs from the earlier ones in the amount of data that they have used. They have looked at 560,000 SNPs in the Indian population. Though their SNP numbers were very large, the sample size of groups and people chosen were not high. They took only 132 individuals from 25 groups in 13 states. The earlier studies had looked at much smaller number of SNPs and therefore the fact that even with a much larger number of SNPs, the same results have been reached is a vindication of the power of genetics in unravelling some of these questions.

Though they have been careful not to suggest that the genetic studies tell us anything about language – Indo European or Dravidian -- the data seems to suggest that there is more of an influx from the North West of India to North India. This is of course a trivial result, as geographically this is but natural. The more interesting result is that there is no evidence of genetic outflows from India to the Euro-Asian population outside: the gene flows have been inwards. This makes the RSS thesis of India Europeans being descended from an Aryan Vedic population in India that spoke Sanskrit (in their view, the mother of all Indo-European languages) a non starter. However, when has facts ever interrupted their thinking processes?

The press reports of this study have been quite mixed. Some have claimed that the genetic studies show there is no difference between South Indians and North Indians. Some have also claimed that the Aryan Dravidian divide is a myth. The study clearly shows that while the ANI and ASI population are present in almost all the Indian population groups, the proportions are different. The more north we go, the proportion of ANI rises, while the more south we go, the more it falls. The Indian Palaeolithic population consisted of first the ASI, which settled at least 65,000-70,000 years ago. The second group, the ANI came around 40,000-50,000 years ago. The Onge is a part of the ASI population and branched off from the ASI about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago and show no ANI markers.

Different groups in India seem to have a small founding population. This would signify that groups have tended to interbreed from its small initial numbers and this inbreeding goes back for a very large number of generations. Therefore, the thesis that caste is either a freezing of occupation based groups or a later invention of the British is shown to be quite bogus. That gene flows across groups are limited show that caste is descent-based and formed quite early in India.

The small founding population and inbreeding populations have some medical implications. Each of the groups have a larger share of what are called recessive genes and this would show up in a higher prevalence of genetic diseases based on recessive genes.

As we have written earlier, no serious historian today posits a huge influx of Indo Aryan speaking people replacing the original population in the north. The spreading of language can take place through dominance of a group, conquering the rest and becoming the new elite. This squares well with what the genetic record now tells us and is very much in line with what historians such as Iravati Karve, DD Kosambi and Romila Thapar have maintained. It is also in line with the linguistic evidence that we have.

There has been a relative scarcity of such studies for the Indian population. India has a much greater diversity in not only its cultural matrix but also at the genetic level. The other such diverse population is found in Africa. Given that Africa has the oldest ancestral population this is not surprising. To give depth to such studies, we need to sample across a much larger set of groups – both cultural and geographical. The study is therefore of great significance and will pave the way for a better understanding of the ancient migration patterns in South Asia.