India has yearned for desolate space rocks since 1975, and this year their dreams came true. The country joined a small number of nations who spend billions of dollars shooting hunks of metal at a distant stone for little obvious gain. In other words, they landed a rover on the moon. India’s August 23rd moon landing was streamed live for 8 million simultaneous viewers, the most-watched stream in Youtube’s history. Like its predecessor Apollo 11, India’s moon landing was both a moment of nationalist catharsis, and a trade-off. “How come there ain’t no money here?” asked Gil Scott-Heron, an American poet and musician. His answer? “Whitey’s on the moon.” Is it right for nations plagued by inequality—like the United States and India—to spend untold billions on a rock that will never love them back? To answer that question, one has to examine the root of their perverse obsession.

How—and Why—to Nuke Your Enemies From Space

The US went to space to kick Russia’s ass. After the launch of Sputnik in 1957, both the United States and the Soviet Union realized they could snap photos of one another’s naked bodies from space. Between 1957 and 1985, 75% of all satellites launched were there for military purposes: spying, and improving the performance of conventional and nuclear weapons.

As much as the warring powers liked each other’s naughty photos, the military justification for space programmes was more subtle. Fear that a direct attack would provoke nuclear annihilation—combined with a need to show military superiority—drove a proxy war, in which both nations sought to show their military strength through technological and industrial superiority, a process that Freud called “sublimation.”

In his psychoanalysis of Leonardo da Vinci, Sigmund Freud introduced sublimation to psychology, writing, “The sexual instinct is particularly well-fitted to make contributions [to one’s professional life] since it is endowed with a capacity for sublimation: that is, it has the power to replace its immediate aims by aims which may be valued more highly and which are not sexual.” Sex can drive one to pursue other, non-sexual goals; the activities may be different, but the pleasure is the same. The United States would love to blow its payload all over Russia, but doing so risks ending the world; instead it channeled that energy into NASA. No country wants to be a two-pump chump.

India’s space programme was the product of agricultural, rather than military, development. A major goal of India’s space programme, writes Professor Michael Sheehan in the International Politics of Space, is to use satellite sensing to prevent damage done by pests, floods, and droughts, and these satellites have been instrumental in supporting the country’s economic growth.

Accordingly, the Indian government has long justified its space programme on economic grounds. In 1937, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared, “It was science alone that could solve these problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and the deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people,” and it was in the same spirit that Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India’s August 23rd landing was “a moment for a new, developing India.”

This space programme has a dark side. India—like the United States—went to space to kick ass. Sheehan writes: “The Earth-observation satellites India has launched can be used for military reconnaissance as well as developmental purposes, monitoring troop movements and build-ups, major military facilities, and weapons development sites.” In the 1980s, India used these capabilities to develop a number of short-range guided missiles; by 2000 India had intermediate range ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons. India is bordered by Pakistan and China, two nations with which it has strained relations and disputed territory. Possessing nuclear missiles is a deterrent against aggression by its neighbors.

The Shoulders of Giants

India’s moon landing doesn’t have a direct military application, but it does generate prestige. “India is on the moon,” declared the chairman of the Indian Space Resource Organization. With this landing, India joins an exclusive club. Before the landing, only the United States, Russia, and China had successfully landed on the moon. “Russia, China, the United States, and India” is a list of three of the world’s pre-eminent economic and military powers, and India. Membership on this list indicates that one is not to be trifled with.

Beyond military prestige, landing on the moon positions India as a technologically and industrially capable state. The Cold War space race was a contest between the United States and Soviet Union to see who had the bigger member, and contemporary space missions are no different. Russia’s failed moon landing mere days before India’s successful one is another sign of its shrinking… economy.

While the landing heightens India’s prestige, it also degrades it by inviting corporations to take advantage of the country’s cheap labor. The Indian Space Resource Organization touts that the most recent mission to the moon cost a paltry seventy-five million dollars. NASA can’t do it cheaper. The low cost of India’s moon mission is partially because it took a more fuel-efficient route to the moon, but the real reason NASA will never beat India on cost is that workers make more in California than in Bangalore. Emphasizing the low cost of India’s moon mission tells corporations they can offshore skilled technological jobs to India, where they will be done just as well as in Silicon Valley—and at a fraction of the price; disincentivizing India from instituting protections for workers or supporting domestic labor unions. 

Whitey On the Moon

Is it all worth it? For India, or for the United States? There is a clear utility in having survey satellites like the ones India uses to survey land or mitigate flood damage; or the United States’s LANDSAT, and given that the value of such technologies is bound up with other segments of the economy like agriculture, it is difficult to estimate exactly what the returns to such programmes are to compare with what else the money could have been used for; although we know the returns to these satellites are significant. 

The case for going to the moon is murkier. Moon landings seem to provide little other than a sense of national pride. The most miraculous thing about Apollo 11 was not that the United States put two men on the moon, it was that—after the Soviets beat the US at putting things everywhere else in space—the US managed to convince the world it won the Space Race. For the US, it was a multibillion dollar marketing campaign for global capitalism; for India, it seems no different.

The author wishes to thank Sam Lehman for his helpful comments, and Serina Zheng for her unhelpful ones.