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.
“No other
space agency
in the world
can pull off a
planetary
space mission
in such a
compressed
timeframe”
Why
India Is
Investing
in Space
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