Protoplanet, a nascent training platform established just last year, is focussed on building a comprehensive research programme, which is a culmination of work done in India and for India over the past decade, starting around 2016.

Siddharth Pandey, director of Protoplanet and a former Nasa hardware engineer, describes his team’s research in astrobiology and planetary sciences as significantly “ahead of the curve”, providing critical training for deep-space exploration. He feels many non-scientists are unaware of how space exploration benefits their lives and stressed the need to move beyond justifying missions by merely comparing their low cost to Hollywood movie budgets.

The team just completed its inaugural venture HOPE (Himalayan Outpost for Planetary Exploration) mission at the Tso Kar valley in Ladakh, developed jointly with Isro’s Human Space Flight Centre (HSFC). The mission’s primary goal was to study the effects of extreme environments on the human body—research which could yield critical data for scientists, engineers, astronauts, and students globally.

In this interview with Forbes India, Siddharth Pandey talks about the HOPE mission in Ladakh and the various extreme environments in India. Edited excerpts:

Q. How did Protoplanet start?

Protoplanet is a culmination of work that we had been doing in India and for India for the last decade. This was essentially running a lot of training projects in space exploration, particularly in the field of astrobiology and planetary sciences. We were doing things in India even before they were officially part of Isro's (Indian Space Research Organisation) mandate. I'm talking about the 2014-2016 timeframe, when Isro had not yet announced the human space flight programme or Chandrayaan 3. I was in India in 2019 at Amity, I saw the ecosystem is coming together. Isro was opening to startups and research institutions to involve them into flying payloads. So, sometime last year, we realised it was time to set something up because, unless we do it, no one else was going to do it. My focus has always been beyond the low earth orbit—microgravity research or what........

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