Susmita Mohanty: A Space Odyssey

Space designer and entrepreneur Susmita Mohanty believes that space is not the final frontier. But even as she looks beyond the horizon, she’s working to make India’s space programme commercially profitable.

- Mansi Kapur

She was born after HAL 9000, the sentient computer and the central character of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, became a cult. But one day, in the summer of 1996, when she was 24, she was woken up from an afternoon nap by a phone call from Clarke. The science fiction writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and futurist had called to offer to pay her fees so she could enrol for a master’s degree in space studies at the International Space University (ISU) in France.

The legendary Clarke must have seen the future—again—because the young woman he called on that hot afternoon 21 years ago today designs spacecraft and has set up companies dealing with space equipment design and international space collaboration. She’s now planning to launch her next venture to enable the use of geo-intelligence data to solve everyday problems across sectors such as agriculture, environment, and energy. Meet Susmita Mohanty, someone we have to call an interstellar Indian.

Back to that summer of ’96, Mohanty tells me how the call from Clarke came about. “I grew up with a healthy dose of space,” she says. Her father, Nilamani Mohanty, a space telecommunications expert, was a member of Vikram Sarabhai’s team at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), and retired as the deputy director of ISRO’s Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad. Apart from her father, Mohanty was inspired by the great architects of the time—B.V. Doshi, Charles Correa, Gautam Sarabhai, Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn.