Above moon, a moment of stillness

livemint.com:

SUV). Imagine it not on the street, but hovering about 750m above your head. I do mean hovering.

It doesn’t hang from anything, it is not tethered to anything, there’s nothing holding it up. It’s just there. You’d be pretty impressed, I’d say.

Sure, you might run for cover so that it doesn’t fall on your head, but you would indeed be pretty impressed. How does this 1,700kg behemoth stay aloft? Well, something akin to that small miracle is what happened on Wednesday evening. Ok, it wasn’t an SUV.

Ok, it wasn’t above your head, nor even above the heads of anyone else on the planet. But it was the moon and it was the Chandrayaan-3 mission’s landing module, Vikram. And, for a few seconds on Wednesday evening, it was pretty much stationary above the moon’s surface.

Hovering. Ready to drop those last few hundred metres. There’s plenty to marvel at in the whole Chandrayaan mission, in space travel in general, really.

But if you put a gun to my head and asked me to pick one heart-stopping moment, I would choose this one. For me, at any rate, it speaks of the singular triumph of science that this moon mission really stands for. In that sense, it’s analogous to a plane taking off.

Think of it: A little over a century ago, if you told a random human being that an enormous object weighing nearly 200,000 kg—your typical Boeing 747—could rise into the air and stay there, I think that random human being would have looked at you strangely and hurried to get away from you. Yet today, it’s just a routine part of life. It doesn’t even strike us that a plane’s take-off really embodies an enormous belief and trust in science.