Interdisciplinary Careers in Space: Navigating the Future

In a conversation with a friend about the multidisciplinary evolution of space as an industry, a thought came across: the applications of space will gain dominance over the basic skill sets required till now in outer space and in astrophysics.

 

One can imagine a basic discipline and an application as two platforms sitting on top of each other. For example, in basic discipline lies the ability to sail a ship and navigate. On the application platform, the same is exploration of new worlds. Then there are technologies which develop. In the beginning, people sailed with only the land in sight and that's how they rounded the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. But once navigation was done in a better way using the stars and latitude and longitude, along with sophisticated timepieces (chronometers), it was possible to sail without keeping the land in sight. Christopher Columbus is celebrated for the voyage from Europe to America, which involved two different land masses. In the same way, space exploration will change dramatically in the coming days, months, and years.

 

Kalpana Chawla had the basic discipline of Engineering and robotics, but the application that she was recruited for was the robotic remote operations on the space shuttle. This sort of exemplifies the new structure of space ventures.

 

Likewise, there will be more applications that will find themselves in great demand in the future but will have the platform of a basic discipline. For example, if chemistry is the basic discipline, then using available water on the Moon one can help create a controlled atmosphere for sustaining human life and utilize the resource of hydrogen for powering space launches from the Moon.

 

We have seen the application of precision and course correction guidance being perfected after the disaster of Chandrayaan 2 so that better logic and software were in place for Chandrayaan 3's mission completion. The issues in the tragic end of Chandrayaan 2 could not be resolved by the onboard computer program. The Japanese Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) got its Sniper nickname because it is designed to land within 100 metres of a specific target on the surface – much less than the usual range of several kilometres. All of this is a matter of software precision and application to space challenges.

 

Therefore, I am just extrapolating that the basic disciplines required for the applications of future space ventures will be quite different from those of the last decade or more. Now, more than ever before, basic disciplines will intermingle for better performance in the context of the new environments that space will present, whether on the Moon, Mars, or an asteroid, for example, Bennu.

 

Hence, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches towards careers in the space sector will be the norm in the future. Students aiming for careers in this field should work towards the moving target of the confluence of certain disciplines which could set the stage in the future. For instance, biology and food resources are already feeling the demand for expertise in working in zero gravity and in simulated lunar and outer space ecospheres.

 

This is my thinking and conjecture. It is simply gazing into the future. Students have to contemplate their own circumstances and context, and then work towards their career goals, which should also encompass their own interests alongside this multidisciplinary conjecture that will emerge in the future.

Bhanu Srivastava