Our July 2000 cover

In fact, at the time of our last cover story titled "Moon Mission" in July 2000, I bet a bottle of champagne with Raj that this would not happen. The result is we keep a close watch on the progress of India's space programme.

Last week India crossed a major milestone by joining a select club of nations that could not only build and launch satellites but also manoeuvre a spacecraft back to earth. This takes the Indian space programme to a completely new level and actually opens up space exploration to our scientists as the next frontier.

Gone are the days of Indians piggybacking other country's space technology and taking pride in the presence of persons of Indian origin on NASA space teams. The countdown to putting an Indian in space has actually begun.

What this latest development will most intangibly do is strengthen India's brand in the world of science and technology. Space is a high-risk business with a very low margin of error. Only a few countries, developed or developing, have the ability to work in it. The costs may seem astronomically high but the cost of putting an Indian in space-Rs 10,000 crore over 10 years-is actually the equivalent of buying two Boeing aircraft every year for the next decade.

In response to USSR's first man in space, Yuri Gagarin in 1961, America's charismatic President J.F. Kennedy galvanised the nation when he said, "It will not be one man going to the moon, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there." Besides national morale-boosting, the US' space programme had many technological spin-offs which impacted everyday life and that is something India's space programme hopes to do too.

As Raj, who also wrote this week's cover story, says, "Space exploration is the cutting edge of science, not some esoteric toys for the boys stuff. It is important for India to have its flag out there." The start of the first fully indigenous programme to put an Indian in space prompts me to ask the question-what are we going to call him?

The US, Russia and China, the only three countries that can put people in space, call their travellers by different names: astronauts, cosmonauts and taikonauts. My name for the Indian would be 'yoginaut' and when that happens I will be minus one champagne bottle.

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