When a future ‘Gaganyaatri’ retraced Ryland Grace’s path to Tau Ceti

Dr. Ryland Grace and his alien pal Rocky would have been thrilled had they been present at the Institution of Engineers hall in Thiruvananthapuram on Saturday morning.

Group Captain Angad Pratap, one of the four astronaut-candidates picked for India’s Gaganyaan human spaceflight programme, chose the star systems depicted in the hugely popular novel and film Project Hail Mary to describe the prospects and challenges of future space exploration and the enormous distances involved in it.

So, earth’s own Sun, Tau Ceti — a main sequence star some 12 light years away from our solar system — and 40 Eridani, the triple star system of Rocky’s home world, came alive briefly in Thiruvananthapuram as a rapt audience paid close attention to Mr. Pratap.

While Dr. Grace and the five-limbed Rocky are the fictional protagonists of the Andy Weir novel made into a Ryan Gosling-starrer movie directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the star systems mentioned in the works are of course real ones.

Mr. Pratap’s talk at the 39th National Convention on Aerospace Engineering (NCAE) organised by the State chapter of the Institution of Engineers (India), touched upon human spaceflight, astronaut training and the future of space exploration. He described the hurdles of space exploration — the enormous distances between stars, the restrictive aspect of the speed of light and the concept of time dilation.

Earlier, Mr. Pratap had started off his lecture by quoting Vikram Sarabhai, the father of the Indian space programme: “He who can listen to the music in the midst of noise can achieve great things.”

During his one-hour talk, Mr. Pratap presented two scenarios from Neil Armstrong’s missions to describe the risks and challenges that astronauts face. The first was video footage of NASA’s 1966 Gemini 8 mission on which Armstrong — who three years later would become the first man on the moon — was one of the astronauts. The mission is known for the ‘uncontrollable spin,’ an in-space system glitch. The second instance was from the Apollo 11 mission when Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had to avoid the Little West Crater to land the lunar module safely on the moon’s surface.