India in the Second Space Age of Interplanetary Connectivity

Chaitanya Giri is the Fellow of Space and Ocean Studies at Gateway House: Indian Council for Global Relations, India. His researches on techno-geostrategy, analyses of space industrial complex, space exploration policy, and planetary and astromaterials science. He is an affiliate scientist at the Earth-Life Science Institute at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. He has a Ph.D. in Chemistry specializing in astrochemistry space payloads from the Université Côte d’Azur, France. At the same time, he was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. He was the co-investigator of the COSAC payload on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. His research has earned him several fellowships and awards, including the 2014 Dieter Rampacher Prize of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Science, Germany, and the 2016-2018 ELSI Origins Network Fellowship at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Chaitanya consults India’s strategic agencies and reviews India’s science and technology diplomacy, and delivers talks at various academic and non-academic institutions in India and abroad.

1. Introduction 2. India and a Brief History of Time in Space Exploration 3. Dawn of the Second Space Age 4. The Global Planetary Exploration Roadmap: Cooperation and Contest 5. Plugging India into Interplanetary Connectivity Projects 6. The Economics of Interplanetary Connectivity 7. The Second Half of the 21st Century: Will Humans become Interplanetary Species? 8. Conclusion