Now US President and then (1992) Senator from Delaware, Joseph R Biden was instrumental in depriving India of the cryogenic engine technology that powers India’s GSLV series of heavy-lift rockets. The GSLV series of rockets is meant to launch payloads between 2 to 4 tonnes into Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO), the heaviest rocket of this class, which will also launch India’s manned spaceflight mission Gaganyaan.
“This is no meager sale; It’s dangerous,” he described the then-India-Russia deal for the Russian ‘KVD-1’ cryogenic engine, one of the best in the world. It is widely believed that the Americans eventually succeeded in delaying India’s march into space. Joseph R. Biden was among the obvious contributors to the act, which India (at its own peril) for) effectively resisting or refusing to turn away immediately.
barely 35 years after inception Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) The country was able to launch its PSLV rocket in 1994, in a church-built laboratory at Thumba, Thiruvananthapuram on India’s southern coast. This was a significant achievement for a country that was launching a ‘sounding rocket’ experiment similar to fireworks. Until the late 1960s, when America landed humans on the Moon.
A large part of the success and reliability of the PSLV rocket is due to its development engine, which was co-developed by ISRO and French SEP engineers. It was Princeton-PG ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan (now regarded as the father of liquid propulsion engine technology in India) who led the ISRO team in co-development of the engine (called the French Viking-3 and Bharat Vikas). . Notably, this engine still powers the PSLV and GSLV rockets today.
Buoyed by the success in co-development of the Vikas engine, India entered into a deal in 1991 with its all-weather partner Russia to acquire a handful of KVD-1 engines and technical know-how, practical training for production. Such a deal was India’s best and fastest shot at entering the global league of engine heavy-lift rockets within India. The Rs 235-crore Russian deal was barely 1/4th of the price quoted by American company General Dynamics to sell inferior American cryogenic engines in India. However, US intelligence caught wind of the Russian deal and tried every trick in the bag to scuttle it and eventually delay the Indian space program.
Methods used by the Americans included sanctions on Indian and Russian space agencies, in addition to enforcing an irrelevant ‘Missile Technology Control Regime’ (MTCR) treaty, which prevented the proliferation of long-range missiles. Ironically, the Americans themselves had offered India the same cryogenic technology for a higher price (which was then not objected to under the MTCR). Furthermore, it was well known to all military powers that cryogenic engines found no use in missiles (which are not powered by solid and super-cooled fuels). When the sanctions had no effect on the Indian or Russian space agencies, both of which did not do business in the US, the Americans began to try even more to cancel the deal.
The dissolution of the then Soviet Union made it easy for the US to bully and intimidate Russia by refusing to provide financial aid to the crumbling superpower. “I’m sure Russian leaders will recognize the wisdom of stopping this sale when they see the risk of losing their funding. This is no small sale; it’s dangerous.” The LA Times quoted Biden from 1992. The then-Senate Committee (of which Senator Joseph Biden was a member) threatened to withhold $24 billion in aid to Russia if Russia went ahead with a rocket deal with India. Despite all these threats, Russia and India pushed their deal and devised measures to broadcast American dirty tricks.
However, all these attempts by India and Russia failed when the compromising personnel of the Kerala Police and senior officials of the Indian Intelligence Bureau coined the famous ‘ISRO spy case’. The main victims of the case were related to India’s cryogenic engine project, in particular – Nambi Narayanan, Cryogenic Project Director at ISRO, who was also instrumental in developing India’s Vikas engine. While Nambi Narayanan was in jail and brutally tortured by the IB and the Kerala Police, the political fallout of the case in Kerala helped a section of the then Kerala Congress to topple its own chief minister and install a new one.
After India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took over the case, it was established that the ‘ISRO spy case’ was a fabricated conspiracy by IB and Kerala Police officials. However, given India’s excruciatingly slow judicial system and labyrinthine processes, those who conspired against the national space program are still free (court proceedings and investigations are ongoing).
The involvement of criminal elements in the IB and Kerala Police may give rise to the question as to how Joseph Biden or the US is involved in this conspiracy. The answer is simple – the Americans were able to delay India’s cryogenic engine project, for the benefit of their own space industry and global launch market dominance.
If everything had gone according to plan, if India had developed its own cryogenic engine and deployed it on the GSLV rocket by the turn of the millennium, India would have a better chance in the US-dominated (then $330 billion) global space Would have been a significant portion of the pie. Economy This would enable India to progress and develop into a significant space player throughout the decades of the 21st century. While India eventually developed its own cryogenic engine, it is noteworthy that – by 2021, India’s share in the $447 billion global space economy is less than 2%.
In the last three decades, India-US bilateral relations have improved so much that, ISRO and NASA will launch a joint mission NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) in 2022. These days, the US government describes India as one. “Strategic Partner”. It remains to be seen whether the US will take this seriously and make up for the precious years lost and the significant damage done to the Indian Space Research Organization. Will the US be open to involving India in high-end projects related to the International Space Station, the Space Force or advanced exploration missions under Biden-Harris, technical cooperation that could enable a quantum leap for India. Or will these projects be open to collaborators only?
Whichever direction it goes, it will not be an excuse to forget the past chapters of American evils inflicted on India as well as India’s own pitifully lackadaisical and sluggish responses to these historical injustices.