Musuka on the moon

 In a cramped and crowded mission control the simple Indian-built displays registered the changes in velocity as Chandrayaan-3 approached the target. It brought back the excitement of the early days of coverage of NASA's sophisticated space centre in 1969. India is the first nation to achieve a soft landing on the south pole of the moon and achieved this largely through her own efforts and ingenuity. India's technologists succeeded where supposedly more experienced Russians failed, and got there before America's more well-funded manned mission. India is the fourth nation to land any craft on the moon, after the USSR, United States and China. That the event occurred during Johannesburg's BRICS meeting must have created some interesting dialogue between President Modi of India and Sergei Lavrov representing Russia.

India had been building up to this. The short documentary Yaanam describes the 2013/14 Mars Orbiter Mission and the historical background to it. Appropriately, given the historical interest in astronomy in India, the language of the film is the ancient one of Sanskrit. The current chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation and designer of the Bahuballi rocket which launched Chandrayaan-3, S Somanath, appears in that film and is also a speaker of Sanskrit. While cinemas around the world are showing Robert Oppenheimer saying "I am become Siva ... the destroyer of worlds", what lines from the Bhagavad Gita might have come to Somanath? (Incidentally, India's NDTV says that his name means "Lord of the Moon".)