Mission Shakti: Retrospect and prospect (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3: Science and Tech
Prelims level : ASAT test
Mains level : Signifiacne of the mission shakti

Context

• Individual research from the 1920s notwithstanding, the establishment of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in 1969 heralded the Indian space programme.
• As the sixth-largest space agency celebrates its golden jubilee, India has slowly and steadily emerged as a pre-eminent space power with 102 spacecraft missions,
• The largest fleet of civilian satellites in the Asia-Pacific region, a successful inter-planetary Mars Orbiter Mission and a world record of launching 104 satellites from a single rocket.
• These scientific and commercial feats weren’t matched by a military space programme; March 27th changed that.
• ISRO being oriented toward civilian space missions, Mission Shakti was the prerogative of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) — the latter publicly conveying the intention for such a test since 2012.

Ballistic Missile Defence

• Responsible for the bulk of military research and development, DRDO demonstrates differential levels of success, but its missile programme is noteworthy.
• Since 2006, a Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) project is under way and the ASAT missile appears to be adapted from the BMD interceptor.
• Scientific rockets and missiles being technologically identical, theoretically any country able to build and operate a ballistic missile can launch rockets and vice versa and potentially target satellites, too.

Capabilities by BMD

• However, reality dictates that only a successful BMD facilitates the remarkable precision necessary for a Direct Ascent Kinetic Kill ASAT — few meters in dimension, satellites move in the orbit at approximately 28,000 km per hour, presenting the greatest possible challenge of interception.
• This exercise then also supplements the indigenous multi-layered BMD programme.
• A BMD, by destroying incoming missiles, provides a strategic umbrella, while leveraging extant BMD infrastructure to develop a Kinetic “hit-to-kill” ASAT system, enables a cost-effective space weapon: à la Mission Shakti.
• ASATs can be either temporarily or permanently effective (denoting “soft” or “hard” kill) and are categorised depending on their nature of deployment, whether they are based in earth, air, or space, and on the technological medium used — missiles, lasers/directed energy beams, electromagnetic pulse, micro-satellites, or electronic jamming. ASAT weapons, once pioneered by the erstwhile Soviet Union and US, are now flourishing in China; the latter, along with conventional capabilities, presents the most formidable challenge to India.
• The expanding arsenal of Chinese ASAT implies that India needs to develop ASAT systems in both quality and quantity.

India’s stance on ASAT test

• The traditional Indian stance has been in favour of disarmament and preserving space as a global common; ongoing negotiations at the global stage indicate an impending regime on space weapons which would have probably foreclosed India’s option to test its latent ASAT potential and restricted ASAT capabilities to the US, Russia, and China.
• Space is the pivot of modern societies as it facilitates satellite-based communication, remote-sensing, and imaging features to effect across a spectrum of fields: internet and cellular networks, navigation, meteorology, agriculture, resource management, and disaster response.
• Crucially, security operations are irreversibly dependent on space assets in varying levels of degree from reconnaissance to targeting sans functioning satellites, fighter jets, ships, and missiles are clumsy chunks of metal.
• Central to the governance of space, the Outer Space Treaty (1967) prohibits placing weapons in space itself, but weapons from elsewhere targeting objects in space are not banned; harnessing space technology for strategic utility is routine and universal.
• Subsequent efforts to restrict weaponisation of space since then has stalled, largely (but not exclusively) due to US disapproval and differing legal and technical interpretations.

Way forward

• The momentum needs to be sustained by further steps including but not limited to coherent space doctrines and a robust and dedicated organisation exclusively for offensive military space activities.
• These augur for political will and national consensus on the role of India in outer space in the coming era.
• Technological foundations having been initiated since 2006, arguably the global and regional variables catalysed Mission Shakti.
• Occurring propitiously close to general elections, Mission Shakti didn’t make the Prime Minister unhappy, but to attribute electoral competition as the proximate cause is to miss the forest in search of the trees.

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Prelims Questions:

Q.1) With reference to the World Health Organization (WHO) report on Hepatitis, consider the following statements:
1. Bangladesh is the only country in South-East Asia Region has been able to achieve Hepatitis B control.
2. The prevalence of the deadly disease has increased steadily among five-year-old children in South-East Asia Region except Bangladesh.

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
A. 1 only
B. 2 only
C. Both
D. None

Answer: D
Mains Questions:
Q.1) How India can develop anti-satellite weapons? What needs to develop such systems in both quality and quantity?