A garment worn by an engineer who guided a spacecraft to Mars now hangs in a Washington D.C. museum. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has acquired the cotton sari of Ritu Karidhal, the woman known in India as the ‘rocket woman’ for her role as deputy operations director of the Mangalyaan Mars orbiter mission. The display, inaugurated this week by British ambassador Dame Karen Pierce, is a quiet but powerful testament to the global nature of scientific achievement.
Karidhal’s sari is not merely cloth. It is a symbol of the millions of hours of labour, the unglamorous calculations, the risk assessment spreadsheets that turned a dream of reaching the Red Planet into a £73m success. Mangalyaan, launched in 2013, made India the first nation to reach Mars on its first attempt, a feat achieved on a shoestring budget. Karidhal herself described the mission as ‘a very emotional journey’.
The decision to feature her sari, rather than a plaque or a model, is a deliberate shift in museology. It recognises that science is not conducted by faceless technicians but by human beings who carry their culture into the cleanroom. Karidhal, a mother of two, once said she would return from her day job at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to check homework. Her sari, a simple fabric of handspun cotton, is a rebuttal to the stereotype of the lab coat. It says: you do not need to shed your identity to reach the stars.
British science diplomacy, represented by the ambassador, is wise to celebrate this. In an era of fractured geopolitics, where climate change and pandemic response demand concerted action, we need more displays that remind the public of our shared capabilities. The sari sits alongside the Apollo spacesuit, the Wright brothers’ flyer. It belongs there.
Let us be clear: the Mars orbiter was not a fluke. It was the product of decades of investment in education, a culture of problem solving, and a political system that occasionally finds its nerve. The UK’s own space sector, which generates over £16bn a year, watches with interest. Britain has collaborated with ISRO on Chandrayaan-2 and the forthcoming NISAR satellite. This is not charity. It is mutual benefit.
But the deeper lesson is about the type of society we wish to build. Karidhal’s sari on display is a celebration of a future where talent is not filtered by postcode or gender. The path from a small town in Uttar Pradesh to the control room at Bangalore required mentors who saw past stereotypes. The same is true here. The UK’s own ethnic minority representation in research will not materialise without deliberate effort.
There is also a hard-nosed reality. The rising number of spacefaring nations creates both competition and opportunity. Access to launch services, data sharing, joint missions: these are the new diplomatic currency. The sari ceremony was soft power of the most effective kind. Not a missile, but a woven thread.
Ritu Karidhal did not set out to be a museological artefact. She set out to solve orbital mechanics problems. But she has become one anyway. And in the quiet of the Smithsonian gallery, her sari does what good science communication does: it makes the complex seem human, and the distant seem reachable. For a civilisation facing planetary peril, that is a lesson we cannot afford to ignore.
