In 2019, millions of Indians watched as their country launched its most ambitious lunar mission to date. Over $80 million was spent and the nation's pride was on display and on the line. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched from Mission Control as the Lunar Lander stopped its final heartbeat. Then the communication was lost.
The lander crashed on the surface of the moon. Prime Minister Modi's encouragement and solidarity. Despite its failure, the mission signaled a new direction for the Indian space agency ISRO. In the 1990s, it built the world's most expensive space program. With NASA, it's about pushing the boundaries of innovation, sending hardware to areas in the solar system or the universe that haven't been sent before. In India, it is about setting up the infrastructure that supports the country. In the last decade, India has scrapped its old rule book and launched missions to Mars and the Moon. The initial ambition to help its people has now expanded to lead the world. Our current Prime Minister Modi sees space as a strategic sector. Historically, India could not compete with mega-budget and ambitious spacefaring nations, but that has changed. India now wants to take its next giant leap into space. India's space story is different from space pioneer countries. In July 1980, two decades after Sputnik, India launched its Rohini satellite. Making them the newest member of an exclusive club. But the Indian Space Research Organization is trying differently. Unlike NASA or the Soviet space program, which aimed to explore space for grand, national, and scientific ambitions, ISRO was tasked with creating an indigenous space program solely to enable India to access the practical benefits of space. India has always wanted to develop space science for the betterment of its people. Looking at telecommunications, for electronics, India has used space technology for everything. For the first 20-odd years, the focus was on technological independence.
How do you build your satellites and your ground stations? How do you launch your satellites? Does that mean building rockets?
By 1994, India had its own liquid-phase Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle or PSLV rocket. From the early 2000s to the late 2010s PSLV started to become the world's workhorse. People can come here to launch their satellites in a more cost-effective manner and without compromising on quality. That shift, I think, started at the turn of the century to build the hardware for a country to provide these services globally, and PSLV was a very important part of that. From 1994 to 2017, the rocket launched 48 Indian satellites and 209 satellites from customers abroad. ISRO has taken its place in the field of space. It is a reliable and cost-effective way to launch a satellite into orbit. Launch costs are measured by how much you pay to get one kilogram into orbit. In the mid-90s, India's PSLV rocket was the cheapest way to get hardware into space. It costs around $8,500 per kilogram. This compares to NASA's Atlas II rocket, which costs $18,700 per kilogram. Fast forward to now and SpaceX can get you into low orbit for a fraction of that cost. ISRO has already recognized that the technologies being developed by Elon Musk pose a threat to its business. Competition is increasing in India. Billionaires are entering the field. If India is to maintain its dominant position, the country needs to go further. And that step for India could be its new small satellite launch vehicle. It has a payload of 500 kg and can deliver multiple satellites in one mission. But this new rocket may not be enough. ISRO is also developing a reusable rocket like SpaceX, but its timeline is not clear. Meanwhile, India has signaled its intention to fundamentally reset its space program. We focus on technical independence. It has become mandatory in the last few decades. Now we have to look outside and look far. Sushmita Mohanty has over two decades of experience in the space industry and co-founded India's first private space startup Earth2Orbit in 2009. She now runs a space think tank.
We are at a crossroads and what India is starting to think next? We can build our stuff. We can launch our satellites. We use our satellites for a variety of applications. So I think planetary exploration is the natural next step if you ask me. Sushmita's think tank, Spaceport Sarabhai, aims to promote India's space technology by engaging private companies with ISRO. We want to give India an international voice when it comes to space law and policy, especially about space environment, space resource mining, in-orbit repair, and emerging low economy. We want to guide the government on policy matters using robust research and stakeholder feedback. India's transition from a practical space program to exploration rests on the belief that private companies and private money will take over. India does not have the budget to spend on these things. And private investments are useful. The current government has always said that there is no reason for the government to be in business. And when you see space as a business, as we see in the US or Europe, the moment you see space not only as a business but as a strategic asset, you encourage private companies to make more money. Investment by private companies in Indian space technology is not new. While some private suppliers already supply to ISRO, now the government has opened up. We are looking at private satellite players and private launch players. So this is something new and fresh which is being welcomed by every party. One of those new players is Pixxel. Based in Bangalore since 2019, they manufacture satellite hardware and software.
We fit into the new mold of companies operating independently without relying on government support but work hand-in-hand to ensure that the country's legacy can now be taken to the global level. We are building the world's first fleet of hyperspectral imaging satellites, which will provide a far more detailed view of our planet than has ever been possible. Constellation is global and it also provides data daily. When it comes to software, we take this data and build tools that gather insights into how the assessment, soil, health, and pollution are doing. Pixel is part of a new crop of startups vying for ISRO contracts. Historically, winning large government contracts has been more difficult for smaller companies. But that is changing. ISRO has done everything it needs to in terms of indigenous capability. Now it is the responsibility of the private sector to take up and build on top of communication whether it is earth observation, GPS, and whatnot. That leaves space agencies to do cutting-edge work that only governments are willing to spend on, a private company would never spend billions of dollars on pure research and scientific perspective alone. Prime Minister Modi himself led this change in India's space policy. He promoted India's space ambitions as a source of national pride. He sees space as a strategic field both from an economic perspective and as a geopolitical tool. He wants the country to progress towards a 5 trillion dollar economy. So space plays a huge role in terms of products and services. As a politician, he knew how space could help strategically in terms of war resistance. Space plays a role there, and so does diplomacy. So I think he uses two dimensions of space. But while the government drummed up support, critics pointed to the paradox that 360 million Indians live in poverty. India is a developing country running a fiscal deficit, which runs a budget deficit. So the money you put into the space budget is always under consideration for a country that doesn't have enough toilets for its people.
Do you want to spend money on space technology?
The government does have a tough time at times convincing people why space technology is needed. But at the same time, there are some big advocates for it. I don't think it's an either-or situation it's that if we spend on space doesn't mean we're not spending anything on making other things better. I'll just take an example. Schools in India have spread apart. Some of them don't have connectivity to fiber optics. They don't have connectivity to any kind of internet. When India launched its indigenous communication satellite, a lot of these schools were able to come online and be connected with what the other regions of the country were doing just from the fact that there were a few communications satellites that were sent up that enable that connectivity. Because getting the other infrastructure from a wide perspective was simply not possible. India's spending needs to be put in perspective. The U.S. remains the undisputed big spender, accounting for 58% of the world's space budget, with $47.7 billion spent in 2020. China, which has significantly increased its spending, takes second with $8.9 billion. In 2020, India spent just over $2 billion. What the ISRO and India's space sector are most proud of is what they have achieved with so little. If you look at the budget for India's space mission to the moon and Mars, you realize that they cost a fraction of what it costs to make a Hollywood movie in space. India's first Mars mission cost less than the film "The Martian".India got its satellite to the red planet for $74 million.$20 million dollar less than the budget for the film. Then when you compare their mission to other nations, the contrast is even starker.NASA's Mars satellite, Maven, cost $651 million, that's more than eight times the cost of the Indian mission. But being frugal may not be sustainable or desirable. I think budget constraints can be a good thing, but they can also be a limiting factor. So if you have budget constraints, it invariably helps you do things using methods of frugal engineering, but that's not always good when you look at the market and the economy. In this sense, if I want to go and compete internationally, I'm a company in Bangalore. I would want the kind of capital that a company in California has to be able to compete internationally. So I think we should not stop at frugal engineering. India is looking at space, not just as a strategic asset, but also as sort of a source of future profitability. If you look at the likes of what Elon Musk is doing, they're trying to colonize other planets, and any country, any company, and any individual that does it first will have a big first-mover advantage. I think making space exploration in the coming half-century more humanistic and inclusive geographically speaking, racially, and ethnically, is going to be a huge challenge because a lot of the money rests in a certain part of the world, it would end up being an expedition of sorts where you would only have the wealthy participate, leaving behind a large section of the earth, it's not going to look very pretty. In 1990, Asia nations represented only 9% of global space spending, now it's 19% and rising. India is determined to be a leader, not a follower of the new space race.
0 Comments