Rumi Nations

I have had this idea probably since a decade and a half. My idea is simply this: why can’t there be a permanent full moon out there in the evening sky? Of course, those of you who have always been city dwellers need to get out of your cities and go into the countryside and experience a moonless starry night for yourselves and see the dazzling vista that it presents. And you need to sit on a sea beach on an evening when there is a full moon in the sky and experience something which is awe-inspiring and timeless. We need to find time in our busy lives to spend some time in the lap of nature and reflect on the grandeur of the universe which has been there for almost forever and unless we humans do something drastic selfishly, will go on almost forever as well. Why I use the word ‘almost’ is because, of course, nothing in nature is permanent – nothing really lasts forever . Even the mountains and the oceans and indeed this planet that we inhabit and the moon that we admire and the sun ...

I was wondering if it's a bigger achievement to win a Nobel Prize or to become an astronaut. Hundreds of people have won the Nobel Prize while only a dozen astronauts have landed on the Moon and two dozen in all have left Earth orbit. Even the total number of astronauts who have been to space numbers in the hundreds -- I guess, in time, space travel will become commonplace once the technology for that is developed and then rocket travel might become as common as air travel.

So, India found water on the Moon!!! That was the over-simplied headline in all the newspapers and on TV channels. However, the reality is, of course, as usual a little bit more complicated than that! The simple truth is that a NASA payload, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) found spectroscopic evidence of trace quantities of water on the Moon. This is not really all that of a revolutionary finding. In fact, this was kind of a discovery waiting to happen or waiting for confirmation. It is of course not as if anyone has found great flowing rivers or oceans of water on the Lunar surface - that ain't gonna happen, ever!!! The fact is this: the Moon is not where the game is as of now in terms of space exploration! All the big boys of space (U.S., Russia) have explored Moon in the sixties. The game, if India wants to play, is on Mars right now. It really is a simple matter of how much resource(a.k.a. money) you are willing to put into it. Space science is pricey and nations have to decide...