Young Students Are Inspired By Elon Musk

Meha Mathur Sep 13, 2022

Scientist, a faculty at India’s premier IIT and a co-founder of several startups – an unusual combination of roles perhaps – but Sathya Chakravarthy performs these multiple roles with élan. Besides heading National Centre for Combustion Research & Development at IIT Madras, he has cofounded AgniKul Cosmos, ePlane Co, Aerostrovilos, X2Fuels, GalaxEye and TuTr Hyperloop, besides being advisor to Avishkar Hyperloop. In an interview to BW Education, he describes the innovation ethos at IIT Madras and the reason why youngsters are joining the space race. Excerpts:

What fuelled this dream among a group of youngsters to launch a startup in the space R&D and satellite?

This happened in 2017. Actually, what you would find is, most of the youngsters are fascinated by what Elon Musk has done. What they don’t realise is he actually made a lot of money in PayPal and then he could spend it on SpaceX. But the good thing is that our youngsters are very innovative, and Indians are very frugal in spending, so it is possible for us to actually dream about making small rockets and small satellites, unlike Elon Musk. So, I actually coined the phrase ‘mini Musk’.

If it’s possible for us to identify the detailing of small satellites and launch vehicles and combine it with the frugality of what we can do in India, it now makes it possible for us to make these small rockets and satellites and find small businesses that can benefit from this.

Fundamentally, electronics is shrinking, and so are our cameras. We can put a lot of sensors in smaller space. I think our youngsters are essentially trying to take advantage of it and want to be their own version of Musk.

The public perception is about this space being dominated by the government - ISRO. How difficult was it to break into this domain?

It’s a combination of three things. One is, you need to have entrepreneurs who want to do this. I have been teaching space technology for nearly 25 years and I would actually freely put out some new ideas for making rockets with the students, but nobody would pick it up. It needed a time frame. It was in 2017-2018 when that transition happened inspired by what Elon Musk was doing.

Before Musk also there was a lot of private rockets in the US. But him to be able to make rockets, launch them and launch them consistently and show that the launch cost can actually be brought down was the tipping point.

The second aspect is investors who believe in entrepreneurs. AgniKul was launched in 2018 and got their first funding in 2019, because there were at least one or two investors who believed that the government will eventually come around. And the third piece of the puzzle is the government. In 2016 I gave a Ted Talk, where I basically said that ISRO is the best suited to lead like a grand mission of international mass human exploration, given how they launched Mangalyaan in a frugal way. And in spheres like PSLV they can involve private people and startups. And in 2017, the present chairman of ISRO gave a talk and he said the same thing. And two months into the Covid lockdown in May 2020, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, announcing Aatma Nirbhar Bharat package, also included space. That’s something that we did not expect at all. Obviously, it wasn’t an overnight decision; they must have been thinking about this for quite some time.

So, these three pieces of the puzzle have to actually come together. And as a mature technology country, we need to have the government focus on bigger things like going to the moon and going to Mars, whereas the more commercially oriented efforts they have to push it out to private labs. And that’s exactly what has happened.

Can you describe the IIT Madras incubation ethos?

The IIT Madras entrepreneurship or startup ecosystem has sort of come of age, and it has happened in relatively short period. Around 2013-2014, it was extremely tentative. Now, every six months we are actually jumping by about 30-40 startups. And unlike some other technology institutions, we are primarily in the technology space as we are supposed to be.

We have about 13 to 14 per cent of our faculty involved in about 100 plus startups, whereas the global is only about 10 per cent.

Actually, the faculty are in an advisory capacity in these startups, and not in executive role, although they are co-founders. That is what I do with AgniKul and GalaxEye, which are the space startups, but ePlane is where I actually have taken up an executive position for which I have to be on sabbatical from my IIT position.

Can you describe some of the applications of low-cost satellites? In what ways are these being used for public good?

Today, for example, what we are trying to do is to have a satellite that is actually applicable both day and night. You will be surprised that many a times the kind of cameras that are installed in satellites can see things only during the daytime and if there is a cloud cover, they will not be able to see this right. If there is a cloud cover, then effectively, a satellite active works only 25 per cent of the time in a day.

What we’re trying to do is to break that by putting some infrared sensors alongside visible spectrum sensors so that we can see at night and correlate it with what we have seen during the daytime. It’s called censor fusion. We use this censor fusion for monitoring the earth in real time, through a constellation of satellites. As to some practical applications: A shipping company can actually monitor all the ships that are on the seas at different locations; a global construction company can supervise construction across different geographical locations; and a logistics company that is sending container trucks everywhere can track movement of goods.

You are a science man, teaching space technology. What kind of attitude is needed for a scientist? Also, if you can comment on the status of STEM education in India, and what needs to change?

Actually, a lot of things are already changing. Since I’m always dealing with younger people, I get to see the change that’s happening. The Internet world actually has so much information for a lot of people to learn things all by themselves. It has never been like that before. Even school students are able to actually put projects together with their hands based on what they can see on the Internet. They use classroom education as a guiding principle, and even there, they can at least stay ahead of the curve if they want to. They are transitioning to what is actually called online on-demand education. But the universities are not exactly willing to dish it out the way the younger people want. That kind of a generational conflict will erupt through this decade, and we will have to see which universities adapt to it.

But will the NEP’s provisions, as also dual degrees, address these issues to some extent?

They are progressively addressing, but they are fighting hard to actually keep it within this framework of people entering a college and leaving after four years, going through curriculum and syllabus. We have not broken free of the mould of having to have a classroom teaching superstructure. I think that will be challenged over time. And we will have to see how we cope with it.