Only three decades ago, the Indian space programme was a diminutive affair, dominated by the newfound successes of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) and a then-fledgling clump of communications satellites. Today, the programme is a large tree with a flourishing canopy. There is a slew of ongoing projects accompanied by projects being ideated, developed, tested as well as retired.
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The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) — employer of several thousand engineers, scientists, and administrators — is now accompanied by IN-SPACe, a new nodal agency to oversee and enable private space enterprises’ activities, and NewSpace India, Ltd., to manage commercial launch commissions and commercialise Indian space technologies. ISRO’s spaceport in Andhra Pradesh has expanded to two launch pads while a second port is under construction in Tamil Nadu. Its PSLV rocket is likewise joined by five others — three operational and two in the works — with bespoke features to meet specific civil and national needs while serving commercial markets when opportunities arise.
ISRO operates more than 50 satellites in earth orbit and has launched more than 400 in commercial missions paid for by foreign governments and companies. It has also hoisted four missions to the moon, one to Mars, two space telescopes, and a solar physics probe. Missions in the near future include a synthetic aperture radar satellite co-built with NASA, more interplanetary missions, an orbital space station, and of course human spaceflight.
Its experts are designing next-generation engines (especially the SCE-200), green(er) fuels, and high-performance materials. The organisation is currently transferring SSLV and PSLV manufacturing to industry while government reforms from 2019 invited private enterprises to build and operate virtually any technology.
Defining success
Against the backdrop of India’s history, a national space programme of this magnitude is by all means very successful. ‘Success’ here refers to the programme’s ability to plan and execute longer-term projects with crore-rupee budgets, coordinate activities across multiple centres, manage procurement, logistics, and accounts with industry contractors, and balance political ambitions and public expectations. Unfortunately, neither ISRO nor the programme has the luxury of having their efforts vis-à-vis spaceflight, space exploration, and commercialisation judged only by the yardstick of how far India alone has come.
The fact is the Indian space programme can take great strides and still remain uncompetitive with the other countries belonging to the same elite club to which it has repeatedly claimed to belong. While the U.S. and Russia (including the erstwhile USSR) had a head start of many decades, China, Japan, and Europe for a long time enjoyed more funding, technological sophistication or both.
But it’s also possible to flip this tension the other way. The dramatic rise of commercial opportunities in space technologies and spaceflight — led by the successes of and radical innovation by companies like SpaceX and aided by the struggles of regulatory agencies to catch up — has placed the carts of profit and/or primacy before the horse of national needs.
For example, India is committed to an increasingly complex series of scientific missions to the moon, to be complemented in due course by the Bharatiya Antariksh Station and crewed moon missions. The cumulative cost will be in the tens of thousands of crore rupees and lakhs of work-hours — yet neither ISRO nor the Department of Space have explicitly articulated what the ultimate purpose is here. Simply put, what’s in it for Indians?
Long-term priorities
In 2019-2020, the Department of Space reorganised the space programme to allow ISRO to focus on research. It hived off the responsibility of organising and executing commercial launches to NewSpace India, Ltd. (a public-sector undertaking), in 2019 and that of overseeing the activities of the country’s young and ambitious space startups to IN-SPACe (an autonomous body) in 2020. This division of labour was intended to improve each arm’s ability to better define its goals and work towards them in an era in which space technologies are both diversifying and becoming more sophisticated.
At the same time, the division is still open-ended to the extent that there isn’t a policy or law that specifies what long-term goals they are collectively working towards and why. This is in and of itself not a bad thing if the space programme is also finding its footing, but it can’t afford to take its time. Some important inefficiencies linger in the reorganisation that could lead to the uneconomical use of valuable resources. For example, IN-SPACe is both promoter and regulator of private space enterprises; there is no independent tribunal to settle disputes between private companies and IN-SPACe; and there is no space law attuned to the needs of this new, wider ecosystem of participants.
Nonetheless, the more vehement supporters of India’s plans have advanced three typical arguments: (i) partaking of the comity of nations, (ii) not losing out on future opportunities, and (iii) the value of spin-off technologies. Speculative though the value of all three are, they can’t be dismissed out of hand. Argument (i) in particular is quite valuable: countries working together on space missions can reduce the per-country costs as well as open new channels for soft diplomacy. The value of (ii) and (iii) is more obvious: to keep opportunity costs in future from surging while amortising them in the interim by taking advantage of the new technologies that become available in the course of achieving those overarching goals.
But a direct counterargument here is that the cost of attaining these new technologies can be much lower if we pursued them in a more direct manner rather than anticipating them as spin-offs. More broadly, if there is one correct answer to how ISRO and India should orient themselves — joining the pursuit of greater goals versus being led by Indians’ needs — it has yet to present itself. The leaders of the Indian space programme also haven’t explicitly articulated what their long-term priorities are nor how they are to be determined.
The launch vehicles
As things stand today, at least a significant part of the answer lies with India’s launch vehicles. The reason is simple: both national and commercial missions are affected by their capabilities and availability.
ISRO can currently access four launch vehicles: the PSLV, the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark 2 (GSLV Mk-2), the Launch Vehicle Mark 3 (LVM-3), and the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV). It has also just started work on the Next-Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV) and is conducting what appear to be mid-stage tests of the Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV). It is also making good progress on a human-rated version of the LVM-3, called HLVM-3, for its Gaganyaan human spaceflight missions.
In addition, the Department of Space pays launch service providers abroad to buy payload capacity on their rockets when India’s own don’t fit the bill.
For many years, ISRO followed a supply-driven model of launch services: it would build and launch satellites onboard rockets, then promote the availability of these services in order to induce demand. But as it acquired newer, better rockets as well as access to more launch options, and together with reforms in the space sector, ISRO switched to a demand-driven model: until a customer — within India or international — requested a particular service, ISRO wouldn’t build the corresponding satellite and/or launch vehicle.
The problem now is that people and/or industries have to want a service before it can exist, and they may not think to want it unless the want is acute or, more likely, they may not even be aware of the possibility that a satellite-based service could fulfill their requirements. Because the provision of these launch services is an important revenue source for ISRO as well as the industry member that will operate the satellite, the question is who will be responsible for seeding demand: ISRO or industry. The answer isn’t yet self-evident.
This said, India’s budding space startups could help bridge this gap to a meaningful degree. Soon after the Government of India opened the door to private sector participation, it has also been trying to give the first people through the door a push, or at least is giving an impression to that effect. The government has sweetened startups’ involvement by opening up and/or expanding foreign direct investment (FDI) in rockets and launch facilities and in satellite manufacturing, operations, and data products; floating an interest-free loan pool of Rs 1 lakh crore for all tech startups; an investment pool of Rs 1,000 crore for space tech startups; a 24% hike in the allocation for IN-SPACe; and proposed removing the angel tax — all in 2024 alone.
When she announced the 2024-2025 (post-poll) budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman also said the government hopes the national space economy will expand fivefold in the next 10 years. While the size of the venture capital fund read together with this comment elicited mixed reactions from startup operators, the government’s aim is clear: for private enterprises to take advantage of opportunities in the global space economy — and make use of the available launch options.
Many startups are doing good work. Some notable ones include Bellatrix Aerospace (small-satellite manufacturing and in-space mobility), Digantara (space surveillance and satellite traffic management), GalaxEye Space (multi-sensor earth observation), PierSight (persistent maritime monitoring with synthetic aperture radar satellites), Pixxel (hyperspectral imaging), SatSure (infrastructure and agriculture intelligence based on satellite data), and Skyroot Aerospace (launch vehicle design and construction). I haven’t included many others here strictly due to space constraints.
There’s a chicken-and-egg problem here as well, however. The growth stories of North American and European startups teach us that for them to really break into a traditionally state-held bastion, the government needs to be an anchor customer in their early days: i.e. provide repeating and high-value business. Thus far, the Indian government has failed to do this, instead choosing to provide financial incentives and investment capital. Startup leaders sincerely hope it will resolve this lacuna soon.
The Gaganyaan supremacy
This said, the availability of four launchers with two more in the works doesn’t mean demand is the only problem. There is a significant confounding factor that influences which launcher is picked for which mission, and which becomes clearer when the options are considered one at a time.
The SSLV has been designed such that a new rocket can be built and launched in one week, with a payload capacity of 500 km to low-earth orbit (100 km and above from the surface) and 300 kg to a sun-synchronous orbit. In transferring the manufacturing specs to industry, ISRO’s plan seems to be for companies to sign on launch contracts by satellite providers in such volumes as to keep the SSLV launch manifest busy, and free up the PSLVs and GSLVs for higher-value missions. But it’s not clear whether there is enough demand for small-satellite launches to sustain the SSLV programme.
The GSLV Mk-II is unavailable for commercial launches. In the early days of ISRO’s cryogenic engine programme, it received a few units from the Soviet Union based on which it developed its own variant. ISRO called the three-stage medium-lift rockets that flew with the Soviet KVD-1 cryogenic engines the GSLV Mk-I and those with the Indian variant, called CE 7.5, became the GSLV Mk-II. The GSLV Mk-III is powered by ISRO’s even-better CE 20 engine and a more powerful booster stage. The vehicle was later rechristened the LVM-3 for its distinct design.
The RLV and the LVM-3 need to be understood together. A preamble: ISRO has had a tough time manufacturing launch vehicles for successive missions fast enough. This is why, for example, it had to postpone the launch of the Chandrayaan-3 mission in 2022 to secure a commercial launch contract from the London-based satellite internet services provider OneWeb. The company had originally been scheduled to launch its satellites onboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, but then Russia invaded Ukraine, the UK imposed sanctions on the Asian country, and OneWeb was forced to terminate its contract and look for another provider. This was ISRO, which at the time could build one LVM-3 unit only every eight months and thus had to postpone the Chandrayaan-3 mission to the next year.
Even now, given the investments already made as well as the political mileage its successful execution is expected to yield for the national government, Gaganyaan’s HLVM-3 remains ISRO’s primary focus (as launch vehicles go), leaving other missions to become subordinate to its deadlines. The RLV is one such casualty.
The RLV’s final payload capacity to low-earth orbit is unclear. Even assuming it’s (a high) 20 tonnes, it probably won’t be useful for commercial missions. The SpaceX Starship already offers a higher payload capacity at a lower per-kilogram price. Instead, its features indicate the RLV will be a runway-capable ‘space plane’ that can carry experiments into low-earth orbit, stay there for some time, and bring its payload back. Thus, it’s more like Boeing’s X-37B, somewhat like the Soviet Union’s Buran project, and little like the NASA Space Shuttle. The RLV’s launch profile also means its payload will have particular volume constraints.
This said, thanks to HLVM-3, ISRO has been making slow progress. Even now, it’s not clear when the organisation plans to have the RLV ready for operational missions. And because ISRO currently doesn’t have access to a homegrown launch vehicle for satellites heavier than six tonnes, it has to pay Arianespace or, as it did recently, SpaceX to get super-heavy payloads to orbit. While these foreign options are available, they are expensive, don’t have leeway for the launch vehicle to be adjusted to the payload’s needs, and don’t allow defence technologies to be present onboard.
Finally, and fortunately, there’s little uncertainty about the NGLV’s purpose: it will be a bulkier version of the LVM-3 capable of lifting even heavier payloads to the geostationary transfer orbit, up to around six tonnes. It will also be partially reusable and thus potentially offer a per-kilogram cost for payloads considered reasonable for commercial missions. Work on it could be delayed in the short term by Gaganyaan, but no further.
Better versus good enough
All delays bear the risk of opportunity costs. For example, ISRO’s plan to launch a Venus orbiter has been repeatedly delayed thanks to the unavailability of a launch vehicle, so much so that ISRO wasn’t able to finalise a design until late 2024, six years after announcing payload opportunities aboard the orbiter.
ISRO may of course learn important lessons en route to developing a new rocket but, as mentioned earlier, there will have been cheaper ways to learn them. This need for (reasonable) speed also speaks to the importance of all the arms of the Department of Space — ISRO, IN-SPACe, and NSIL — working coherently towards common goals while keeping the regulatory environment for startups unmuddied by conflicting priorities.
As it stands, developers looking to place satellites in the low-earth orbit have greater access to the SSLV if the payload mass is 500 kg or lower and the PSLV if it’s 1.8 tonnes or lower. If the satellite is heavier and/or the target orbit is the much higher geostationary transfer orbit (36,000 km above sea level), their options are the LVM-3 or a foreign vehicle, since the GSLV Mk II is no longer an option. The LVM-3 of course can’t be availed on short notice while launches onboard foreign rockets are already more affordable than they could be onboard less feature-rich Indian launchers of the future.
This is in fact an important reason why ISRO’s scientific missions have thus far been restricted to simple designs. The Mars Orbiter Mission was only a technology demonstrator. The forthcoming Chandrayaan-4 mission will require ISRO to launch its components in two separate launches, assemble them in space, and then send them to the moon. For all its virtues, AstroSat’s launch mass was restricted to 1.5 tonnes and its primary mirror was only 30 cm wide. The Hubble Space Telescope had a 2.4-metre-wide mirror and altogether weighed 12 tonnes. The ‘Pragyan’ rover of the Chandrayaan-3 mission on the moon’s surface weighed a mere 26 kg; most other scientific rovers have weighed an order of magnitude more. There is no doubt the scientific instruments onboard all these spacecraft were/are capable of good science, but going ahead — if it isn’t the case already — they will need to be capable of much more.
An important if also finer point here is that science is a global enterprise. The Chandrayaan missions, AstroSat, Aditya-L1, etc. are increasing Indian scientists’ access to in-situ data from different parts of the earth’s neighbourhood in the Solar System — but the scientists themselves will need more and better data if their communities in India are to remain competitive with their counterparts in other countries. This in turn means more sophisticated payloads capable of conducting longer and/or better studies, which means a higher payload mass and more frequent launch opportunities, which means the availability of better launch vehicles.
Taken together, ISRO needs to buck up on its launch vehicle options: there are many but qualitative and/or logistical deficiencies often render them unsuitable. ISRO is already working with industry to improve the pace of manufacturing. But the sluggishness thus far has rendered ISRO incapable of working on more than one major mission at a time. Instead it has serialised them, forcing each mission to wait for ISRO to finish working on the one at the front of the line. The only reason this isn’t yet another chicken-and-egg situation is that it is easily broken by giving ISRO more money to expand its workforce, and to administer it, so that it can work on multiple major missions at a time.
As the Indian space programme faces up to more opportunities, it may be better off having the capacity and not needing it rather than needing it but not having it.
Published – February 18, 2025 10:04 pm IST
