The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), easily India’s flag-bearer of research and cutting-edge technologies, hasn’t had a dearth of two things: Success, and goodwill.

The goodwill it enjoys comes from all the successful missions it has completed in the past 50 years — Isro was formed on August 15, 1969 — that have benefitted crores of Indians. From fishermen to law enforcement agencies, and from school teachers to doctors, Isro has touched everybody’s lives through its programmes.

But, the goodwill is not restricted to success alone. India has stood by Isro during many difficult times too, and there could be no better display of this support than last week when it made an unsuccessful attempt at soft-landing the Chandrayaan-2 lander, Vikram, on the lunar surface.

As Isro tries to understand what went wrong with Vikram—it should know by now—which remains quiet since it veered off its pre-planned trajectory and hard landed on Moon in the small hours of September 7, details about everything from the agency continue to be elusive.

Isro is as quiet as Vikram, but its behaviour is less acceptable. Vikram is unable to communicate with Isro, but Isro doesn’t seem to want to communicate in its hour of crisis.

Of course, its chairman, K Sivan, has spoken out. He has made speeches on multiple TV channels, beginning with the government-controlled Doordarshan. He has also spoken with me twice in the past week, but I’ve called him at least 32 times for this. Other reporters I know have had a similar experience.

The media understands Sivan is a busy person, and that he does respond when he has time. But, he has become the only person from whom anybody can get any information out about most things happening behind those high walls of the space agency and reporters are left with little choice but to trouble him, when he probably needs to focus on other things.

He wouldn’t probably get so many calls from journalists if the space agency’s communications team conversed with the media, or even put out efficient statements with adequate information for the public at large. But that has not been the case in the past few months. This has become more apparent in the past week.

So far, other than Sivan’s statements — which have been long when he spoke of the orbiter on Chandrayaan-2 but short and evasive on questions about Vikram and its health — there have only been two specific official releases about Vikram.

Both these releases together have 64 words, and Isro has not been forthcoming with information. Here are the two official statements issued by Isro’s communications team, reproduced from the website:

The first one, dated September 7, 2019, reads, “This is Mission Control Centre. Vikram Lander descent was as planned and normal performance was observed upto an altitude of 2.1 km. Subsequently communication from lander to the ground stations was lost. Data is being analyzed.” This is 37 words.

The second one, dated September 10, 2019, reads, “Vikram lander has been located by the orbiter of Chandrayaan-2, but no communication with it yet. All possible efforts are being made to establish communication with lander.” This is 27 words.

There is a third official release issued by the communications team dated September 7. This 288-word release speaks about how complex the Chandrayaan-2 mission was, why the orbiter is a crucial part of the mission and how its functioning makes the mission more than 95% successful. All of this has also been repeated by Sivan.

A week has now passed since the unsuccessful attempt to soft-land, and communication continues to be elusive. And, this is what an insider observed: “It is ironic that an organisation that has managed to connect an entire subcontinent, by taking communication technology to them, is so unsuccessful at communicating with the masses when one thing goes wrong.”

There is no doubt that Chandrayaan-2 was a complex mission, and that Isro needs to take pride in having put an orbiter around Moon with scientific instruments more sophisticated than it had on Chandrayaan-1, an orbiter mission to Moon, and India’s first attempt at that.

But it is also a fact that India had learnt how to put an orbiter into the lunar orbit more than a decade ago. The highlight of Chandrayaan-2 was its attempt to soft-land a probe on Moon and to then roll out a rover that would also conduct experiments, which hasn’t been achieved.

That said, everybody who covers space science and has any knowledge about technology that enables it knows the complexity involved. For Isro, even the average Indian has understood that the margin for error in space science is almost zero and has stood by the space agency.

So it may not be so bad for Isro to come out with what happened, after all. The agency may not have accurately ascertained what may have caused Vikram to change trajectory and crash, but it certainly, by now, knows what happened and at which moment. And, is it too much to expect a word to fill the void? No.