Browse content similar to India: Reaching For The Stars. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
Line | From | To | |
---|---|---|---|
Get ready, your Indian experience starts now. | :00:26. | :00:36. | |
As soon as you step off the plane, India hits you like a big, | :00:37. | :00:40. | |
It is everything you've ever imagined it to be. | :00:41. | :00:48. | |
The first thing you'll notice will be the traffic. | :00:49. | :00:56. | |
For 70 years this country has been independent of British rule | :00:57. | :01:11. | |
and the cities that have sprung up around | :01:12. | :01:14. | |
the old colonial grandeur seem chaotic, but they do kinda work. | :01:15. | :01:18. | |
And India has found a niche in the wider world. | :01:19. | :01:25. | |
Half of its 1.2 billion people are aged 35 or under. | :01:26. | :01:30. | |
Maybe that's why it's known for its IT know-how, | :01:31. | :01:33. | |
And the bosses of some of the biggest tech companies | :01:34. | :01:38. | |
in taking over the world of consumer technology. | :01:39. | :01:46. | |
After all, how many Indian tech brands can you name? | :01:47. | :01:49. | |
The truth is that although there is a middle class of consumers | :01:50. | :01:54. | |
here willing to buy brands it's not actually that big or that rich. | :01:55. | :02:03. | |
Not that many people here can really afford the latest of very | :02:04. | :02:06. | |
We're here to see how India is preparing for its future | :02:07. | :02:10. | |
and, let me tell you, it is reaching for the stars. | :02:11. | :02:18. | |
In 2013, India became the fourth spacefaring nation to launch a probe | :02:19. | :02:22. | |
into orbit around Mars and, unlike those who came before them, | :02:23. | :02:25. | |
The Indian Space Research Organisation, | :02:26. | :02:34. | |
Isro, has been gaining a reputation for doing tons of successful space | :02:35. | :02:38. | |
Their Mars mission came in at just $74 million, | :02:39. | :02:45. | |
that's less than it cost to make the film Gravity. | :02:46. | :02:48. | |
And, in February this year, they made history again by launching | :02:49. | :02:51. | |
a record 104 satellites on a single rocket. | :02:52. | :02:56. | |
It could just be that India has created the perfect | :02:57. | :03:00. | |
combination of big brains with big space experience, | :03:01. | :03:03. | |
but a mentality for doing things on the cheap. | :03:04. | :03:07. | |
Just the sort of place you might go if you wanted to, | :03:08. | :03:11. | |
say, land a robot on the moon for the space equivalent | :03:12. | :03:14. | |
How confident are you that this will work? | :03:15. | :03:17. | |
Welcome to the earthbound HQ of Team Indus, one of the handful | :03:18. | :03:28. | |
of start-ups competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE, | :03:29. | :03:32. | |
that's $20 million for the first commercial company to land a rover | :03:33. | :03:36. | |
The Team Indus space craft goes into two days of Earth orbit | :03:37. | :03:44. | |
and then, boom, 4.5 days to the moon. | :03:45. | :03:47. | |
12 days of spiralling down to the surface and, | :03:48. | :03:52. | |
if all goes well, out comes the rover, travels half a kilometre, | :03:53. | :03:55. | |
sends back HD video and wins the prize. | :03:56. | :03:57. | |
Rahul Narayan is the co-founder of Team Indus and has been | :03:58. | :04:10. | |
here since the start of the project, way back in 2010. | :04:11. | :04:16. | |
And at that point you had no idea how you would acheive it? | :04:17. | :04:20. | |
Yes, I googled and figured out what Wikipedia had | :04:21. | :04:23. | |
to say about landing on the mood. | :04:24. | :04:24. | |
You did an internet search on how to land on the moon? | :04:25. | :04:28. | |
Did it have any useful information? | :04:29. | :04:33. | |
It said there had been 85 attempts and I think every second attempt | :04:34. | :04:39. | |
Six years later, there are about 100 people working very hard here and it | :04:40. | :04:45. | |
certainly looks like they know their space stuff. | :04:46. | :04:47. | |
Even the toilets are appropriately labelled. | :04:48. | :04:53. | |
And they've built themselves all the things that | :04:54. | :04:55. | |
a serious space company should have, like a mission control room, | :04:56. | :04:58. | |
a model lander that makes smoke and a simulated lunar surface | :04:59. | :05:01. | |
So what do you use to simulate moon dust? | :05:02. | :05:14. | |
Just like national space agencies, testing every component | :05:15. | :05:17. | |
and simulating every stage of the mission is a huge part | :05:18. | :05:19. | |
We're making sure we do everything right. | :05:20. | :05:23. | |
We're going to make it frugal, specific to the mission, | :05:24. | :05:30. | |
but there's absolutely no corners that we're cutting. | :05:31. | :05:32. | |
And, to look at it from a more philosophical way, | :05:33. | :05:35. | |
We don't have a flight spare, so if one blows up we can go and fly | :05:36. | :05:41. | |
the other, we have to get this right. | :05:42. | :05:43. | |
Team Indus is one of five start-ups from around the world that have | :05:44. | :05:47. | |
secured launch contracts for their rovers. | :05:48. | :05:48. | |
While they can't say for sure, they think they'll launch before | :05:49. | :05:51. | |
any other team and so perhaps be the first team to land and win! | :05:52. | :05:57. | |
Well, that's except for the fact that to save costs they have had | :05:58. | :06:01. | |
to sell some of their spare launch weight to a competitor rover. | :06:02. | :06:04. | |
Japan's Team Hakuto will onboard too. | :06:05. | :06:07. | |
You're both going to get to the moon at the same time. | :06:08. | :06:10. | |
It's whoever touches down first and whoever has the fastest rover? | :06:11. | :06:15. | |
It's going to be crazy! In a manner of speaking, yes. | :06:16. | :06:20. | |
So it's a race, it will be a very interesting race, | :06:21. | :06:31. | |
and once we touch down and both the rovers are deployed, | :06:32. | :06:34. | |
let's see which one makes 500m first. | :06:35. | :06:36. | |
All of that assumes of course that the rovers | :06:37. | :06:41. | |
make it to the moon in the first place. | :06:42. | :06:43. | |
Space exploration is a risky business and when it goes wrong it | :06:44. | :06:46. | |
Six years, hundreds of thousands of hours of effort and millions | :06:47. | :06:51. | |
spent and there's certainly a lot riding on getting things right. | :06:52. | :06:54. | |
You mitigate the big pieces and then the you start mitigating the smaller | :06:55. | :07:01. | |
risks and, at the end of the day, absolutely, one small wrong piece | :07:02. | :07:05. | |
of code that made it through could kill the entire mission. | :07:06. | :07:09. | |
There is a word here in India that I think describes Team Indus's | :07:10. | :07:13. | |
I've come to the centre of Mumbai, to Dharavi - | :07:14. | :07:25. | |
Here, in its tiny alleyways, jugaad is all around, | :07:26. | :07:34. | |
as a desperately poor population reuses as much | :07:35. | :07:36. | |
Built by workers who flocked to the city over | :07:37. | :07:43. | |
hundreds of years, some of the houses here date back | :07:44. | :07:46. | |
Up ahead, there is a pile of shredded denim which they use | :07:47. | :08:06. | |
They burn it to fuel the kilns, just like they burn a lot of stuff | :08:07. | :08:11. | |
You can really tell the air quality is very poor. | :08:12. | :08:16. | |
You just have to take a few lung fulls and it | :08:17. | :08:20. | |
starts to burn the back of your throat, it makes your eyes sting. | :08:21. | :08:23. | |
The smoke is a necessary evil for the people of Dharavi. | :08:24. | :08:26. | |
Like most of the developing world, pollution has been the price | :08:27. | :08:29. | |
India is paying for a booming economy. | :08:30. | :08:31. | |
The smog that gives Mumbai its spectacular sunsets has also | :08:32. | :08:33. | |
made it the fifth most polluted mega city in the world. | :08:34. | :08:36. | |
And when the sun disappears before it hits the horizon, | :08:37. | :08:39. | |
In November, 2016, the Indian government declared the air | :08:40. | :08:47. | |
pollution in Delhi a national emergency, with harmful pollutants | :08:48. | :08:50. | |
And it's not just caused by all of the traffic. | :08:51. | :09:00. | |
I was surprised to find out a lot of it comes from diesel generators. | :09:01. | :09:08. | |
See, the electricity in India isn't very reliable, | :09:09. | :09:10. | |
but plenty of businesses need guaranteed power, | :09:11. | :09:12. | |
so they have there own individual generators that fire up whenever | :09:13. | :09:15. | |
the electricity goes down and that means there are loads | :09:16. | :09:19. | |
of exhaust pipes like this all over the city, which regularly belch out | :09:20. | :09:22. | |
When you start looking for them, they're everywhere. | :09:23. | :09:31. | |
Even the mobile masts have backup generators. | :09:32. | :09:34. | |
Here in Bangalore, we've come across a small project to capture | :09:35. | :09:38. | |
So what we have built is a device that attaches to the exhaust pipe | :09:39. | :09:49. | |
of the chimneys and this can be attached to pretty much any exhaust | :09:50. | :09:53. | |
pipe, irrespective of what is the age or type of engine | :09:54. | :09:59. | |
you are running, and it captures practically whatever matter comes | :10:00. | :10:02. | |
Once you capture matter that is substantially carbon, | :10:03. | :10:11. | |
which is like the basis of practically everything that | :10:12. | :10:14. | |
exists in the world, at present we recycle it into inks, | :10:15. | :10:17. | |
which we believe is something used by practically everybody | :10:18. | :10:19. | |
The headquarters of Graviky Labs is a mix of art studio and mad | :10:20. | :10:27. | |
laboratory, the perfect combination, if you ask me! | :10:28. | :10:33. | |
Their so-called air ink does have a few restrictions. | :10:34. | :10:37. | |
It will only ever come in black and at the moment it's not good | :10:38. | :10:41. | |
enough quality to be used in printers. | :10:42. | :10:43. | |
Graviky is giving it to artists, who are finding their own | :10:44. | :10:46. | |
Painting and screenprinting, for example, for use | :10:47. | :10:49. | |
And while the ink may only have limited uses at present, | :10:50. | :11:03. | |
Nikhil insists it is still better to put the carbon to good use rather | :11:04. | :11:07. | |
There are a lot of technologies that have captured pollution in one way | :11:08. | :11:12. | |
or the other, but if you don't recycle it you are actually leaving | :11:13. | :11:16. | |
I'm afraid that's all we have time for in the shortcut of Click, the | :11:17. | :11:34. | |
full-length version is for you on iPlayer right now and there's loads | :11:35. | :11:39. | |
of extra photos from our trip to India at: | :11:40. | :11:45. | |
Thanks for watching and we'll see you soon. | :11:46. | :11:46. |