New dawn in space

Two years after the Centre opened the space sector for private players, a rocket developed by a four-year-old startup, Skyroot Aerospace, has been successfully launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) at Sriharikota. The flight of Vikram-S, named after the father of the country’s space programme Vikram Sarabhai, marks the completion of Mission Prarambh (the beginning). It has three payloads — two owned by domestic customers and one by a foreign client. This includes ‘Fun-Sat’, a 2.5-kg payload belonging to Chennai-based aerospace startup Spacekidz that has been developed by students from India, the US, Singapore and Indonesia.

The Vikram-S launch is a major milestone for India’s space sector, which has for long witnessed the monopoly of state-run ISRO. Notably, ISRO is helping private players find their feet by offering its facilities for testing as well as for the launch of rockets and satellites. Vikram is a series of modular space launch vehicles especially designed for the small satellite market. Hyderabad-headquartered Skyroot has ambitiously declared that launching satellites into space will soon become as easy as booking a cab. Another private company, Chennai-based Agnikul Cosmos, is planning to test-fly its rocket before the year-end. These are good tidings for India’s space programme, which had made rapid strides during the Soviet era before it was rocked by the 1994 ISRO ‘espionage’ case — which later proved to be a frame-up.

In June this year, PM Modi had inaugurated the headquarters of the Ahmedabad-based Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe), the country's space regulator. It is an autonomous, single-window nodal agency for the promotion, encouragement and regulation of space activities of government and private entities; it also facilitates the use of ISRO facilities by private operators. The onus is on IN-SPACe to ensure safety, efficiency and affordability of space vehicles. The time is ripe for India to unveil its much-awaited new space policy, which promises to facilitate better coordination between government entities, space industries, startups and institutions. Sustained focus on research and development, coupled with adequate funding, can pave the way for India becoming a global player in the space sector.