Finding her own space

She is a space architect, one who designs space-stations, spacecraft, spacesuits and the like. But Susmita Mohanty does not work for a government agency, such as ISRO in India or NASA in the US. She is an entrepreneur who has co-founded three companies in three continents: Moonfront, an aerospace consulting firm in San Francisco; Liquifer, which is into spacecraft design, in Vienna; and Earth2Orbit, which prides itself on being "India's first private space start-up".

"I get bored very easily. I believe that if you want to change the world, you have to be an entrepreneur, a free agent. You can't be working for government, or for corporations," says the 43-year-old, who has done her PhD in aerospace architecture and has been living in Mumbai since 2008.

We're chatting on the sidelines of an open house at Khoj, Delhi's contemporary art space, to mark the end of a two-week residency in which CAAS (City As A Spaceship), an art collective comprising Susmita, Barbara Imhof, her partner at Liquifer, and Sue Fairburn, a British design lecturer, in collaboration with Delhi artist Rohini Devasar. Their objective: to re-imagine Khoj Studio, located in the congested, noisy, chaotic south Delhi neighbourhood of Khirkee Extension, as a spaceship.

That might sound like sci-fi, but CAAS believes that the spaceship is a viable metaphor for the way we imagine and design future cities on earth, in terms of its impact on the surroundings. Spacecraft, Susmita says, travel through space, an environment that is extreme, unpredictable and can be hostile. They are thus built like a "pressurised bubble", a closed ecosystem, carrying food, water, oxygen, nitrogen, fuel and facilities to sleep, excrete and relax - everything a human crew would need to live and work in space for a day, two days, a week or longer.

In addition, they must, she explains, manage "the problems of multicultural populations, of privacy, odour, noise, scarce resources, waste management, how to revitalise the air" and other such issues. This is where they are like the mega cities of today. "Densely-populated cities like Delhi or Mumbai makes for a similarly extreme environment. Just getting used to the noise levels takes some time," she adds. "Now that our government is speaking of smarter cities, we must make sure that they are not just WiFi cities, but smarter in other ways too."

Susmita says her engagement with space goes back to her childhood, in Ahmedabad, where her father worked for ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation). "I had begun working on imagined problems of gravity in high school. Those days there was no internet, so I would just mail my work to universities and others. As for addresses, I'd write something like Bill Gates, CEO, Microsoft, Seattle, USA. For every 10 letters I wrote, I would get a response to three. Not bad, huh?"

After getting her initial degrees in electrical engineering and industrial design from the city, Susmita wanted to get into the masters programme at the International Space University (ISU), Strasburg. But that would cost $35,000, far beyond her means. Determined, Susmita says, she "wrote to 70 foundations, to the United Nations in nine different ways, to seven individuals: Carl Sagan, Bill Gates, Arthur C. Clarke, Baldev Duggal. I am that crazy". Amazingly, she got a call from Clarke, the globally-famous sci-fi writer. "It was a weekend afternoon and I was sleeping on a chatai. It was Arthur himself, not some secretary, and he asked, 'How much do you need?'

So I said $4,000. I had estimated that I would raise the rest from others, take a loan. Next day, I sent him a fax saying I was sleeping when you called, and could we talk again. In the end, I raised a loan of $10,000, and he paid the rest. Ever since, he was a mentor."

Susmita got a job with NASA after graduating from ISU. "It is very difficult, almost impossible, for a foreign national," says Susmita, "to work on space projects abroad, because most of them happen in defence sites. It took 15 months to get permission, and I was the only foreign national on the site, escorted at all times. But it was fantastic."

Susmita now has her hopes pegged on opening out India's government-sector space programme for commercial satellite launches — a potential money spinner. With her determination and sass, perhaps, she'll get there sooner than later.