This Publicity No Lunacy

Was the news of India’s first unmanned mission to moon, Chandrayaan-1, carrying two American payloads, overplayed? Was it made to look big becauseNASA administrator Michael Griffin flew down to sign the deal with ISRO’s Madhavan Nair? What’s this breakthrough deal all about? The only significant thing in the May 9 MoU is thatNASA has begun to engage ISRO after decades. But it’s the routine matter of inclusion of US payloads that got prominence. Chandrayaan per se is old news. Some feel there’s probably more politics to the pact-signing event than scientific collaboration. When EU and Bulgarian payloads are also going to be part of the mission, why is it that only US payloads become news? In short, was this a US-arranged publicity blitz? As forISRO, such publicity should not take away from its credit of having survived the sanctions regime, is what some people feel. The whole thing, of course, has to be seen in the context of the Indo-US nuclear deal.