India Abroad - March 31, 2017

INDIA ABROAD March 31, 2017 30 SPECIAL REPORT
INDIAABROAD.COM

And so it seems that India’s space program, which was formed in 1969, is suddenly heating up. Why?

If you pay attention to international politics, you might suspect one reason is the recent rise in Indian nationalism. Modi, who has been in office since

2014, campaigned on a platform similar to U.S. President Donald Trump’s, claiming that India’s previous leaders had failed the nation and that he was the only one who could fix it. He makes policy decisions suddenly and drastically, all the while stoking Hindu nationalist sentiments.

But attributing recent ISRO successes to new nationalism doesn’t ring true to Jaganath Sankaran at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. Yes, Sankaran agrees that “people are looking for things to celebrate and satellites are a proxy for national pride.” But, he adds, space has always been important to India. In 1947, after 200 years of imperialism, the nation was eager to become self-sufficient and develop its own technologies, Sankaran says, including satellites and rocketry. ISRO’s current status and list of accomplishments has been decades in the making—it’s not something that arose within the past few years.

In the early days, the goals of
ISRO were significantly different
from those of the United States
and the Soviet Union, which
were focused on human space
exploration. Instead, India was
keen to develop its satellite
capabilities for mapping and sur-
veying crops and damage from
natural disasters and erosion, for
instance. It also used satellite
communication to bring
telemedicine and telecommuni-
cation to remote rural areas.

ISRO’s founder, Vikram
Sarabhai, said as much when
arguing that a developing nation
like India would need space:
“We do not have the fantasy of
competing with the economical-
ly advanced nations in the explo-
ration of the moon or other plan-
ets or manned space-flight,” he
said, “but we are convinced that
if we are to play a meaningful
role nationally, and in the com-
munity of nations, we must be
second to none in the applica-
tion of advanced technologies to
the real problems of man and
society.”
Another reason to be skeptical
that new nationalism is behind
the rise, says Sankaran, is that
the modern space community in
India is heavily technocratic.

That is, the scientists and engi-
neers tend to call the shots when
it comes to program objectives,
he says. And unlike NASA, which
has some of its big-budget goals
set by the U.S. president, ISRO
has a more bottom-up approach
to larger initiatives. “It’s not the
prime minister’s prerogative to
say build a space station,” says
Sankaran. “If the [space] labs
don’t like it, they can say no.”
One possible reason ISRO

seems to be on the up and up could come from the growing market for space in general. A

2015 report from the Space Foundation estimated the global space economy to be worth $323 billion. In particular, small, inexpensive satellites, like the ones ISRO launched in February, are becoming more popular. Silicon Valley startups like Planet, Vector Space, Spire Global, Capella Space, and others are trying out new technologies and applications. Their systems of choice are small cuboid satellites that are loaded with electronics, imaging and guidance systems, and even their own thrusters for applications that often involve imaging and mapping.

What’s more,
other companies,
including
Facebook, are pay-
ing tens of millions to hundreds
of millions of dollars to develop
and launch larger satellites to
supply internet access to remote
regions throughout the world.
Globally, there are a number
of rocket options for sending
commercial satellites
into space. ISRO, for
its part, offers a rela-
tive bargain. One rea-
son it’s cheaper to
launch with ISRO
than many others is
that Indian labor,
from the scientists
and engineers to
technicians and sup-
port staff, is less
expensive than in the
U.S. and Europe, says
Sankaran.

And when it comes to more complex planetary missions, ISRO also saves money with its organizational efficiency, according to Susmita Mohanty, co-founder and board member of Earth2Orbit, a company that advises international clients on launching with ISRO in addition to offering data analytics for satellite data.

“After the budget for
the Mars mission was
approved, the team
at ISRO put together
the spacecraft and
launched it in just 14
months,” she wrote
in an email interview. “No other
space agency in the world can
pull off a planetary space mis-
sion in such a compressed time-
frame.” This is possible because
ISRO can, Mohanty says, “col-
lapse [organizational] hierarchies
and get the team together to
accomplish the task in record
time.”
Still, there might be another
reason for ISRO’s rise, suggests
Sankaran: the explosion of
media coverage. Historically,
ISRO’s culture has been dictated
by scientists who steered clear of
the spotlight. It’s taken decades
for the media relations side of
ISRO to catch up.

Media coverage will likely continue as more ISRO missions are approved by parliament. These days, India even has human space flight on its agenda. The organization has tested experimental designs for a crew capsule twice, Mohanty notes, with one launch and recovery in 2007 and another in 2014. And last year, the space program flew a scaled-down version of a space shuttle used to test the technology for an eventual, full-sized orbital space plane. “These technology demonstrations prove that ISRO is laying the foundation for human mission sin the near future,” she says.

At the same time, ISRO is working on adding a significant boost to its rockets. In order to even get MOM, which was launched on a PSLV, to Mars, the orbiter had to take extra spins around Earth using its own thrusters to boost it ever higher so that it could eventually escape the planet’s gravity.