WGS 2018: India Emerges As A Serious Contender In The New Global ‘Space Race’

The country’s ambitious space program has rewritten some of the rules of previous initiatives by other countries, and continues to log new achievements. From a moon mission to the current Mars probe, space agency ISRO is changing several aspects of space travel, not the least being the cost.

Back in the 1960s, Thumba was a tiny fishing village on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the Indian state of Kerala. When Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, the physicist and industrialist who initiated space research in India, visited the sleepy coastal village, on the trail of earth’s magnetic equator, he encountered thatched huts, coconut groves, wooden boats, and fishnets. The St. Mary Magdalene Church stood right in the middle of the 600-acre site between the railway line and the coast selected to launch the country’s first rocket into space on November 21, 1963.

The late space scientist Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who was part of this launch team and who went on to become India’s 11th President, wrote in his biography: “The St. Mary Magdalene Church housed the first office of the Thumba Space Center. The prayer room was my first laboratory; the bishop’s room was my design and drawing office.”

From its genesis in a tiny fishing village, India’s ambitious space program was institutionalized with the establishment of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in 1969 – the year in which the United States put a man on the moon. In 2014, it sent an operational mission to Mars – becoming the first country to succeed in doing so in its first attempt. Now, India has plans for a lander on Mars by 2022 and for an orbiter to Venus shortly after.

With governments focusing on space as the next frontier for human development, the topic was widely discussed at the sixth World Government Summit (WGS) in Dubai on February 11-13, 2018, where India was the guest country.

OBSESSION WITH SELF-RELIANCE

Dr. Koppillil Radhakrishnan, the former Chairman of ISRO, under whose helm the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) was launched, spoke at a session titled ‘India’s Mission to Mars’ as part of the Space Settlements Forum at WGS. He said: “Since 1963, when a French rocket took off from a tiny village in India, to today, when we have launched 238 satellites for 31 countries, including the UAE, the Indian space program has come a very long way. Through our obsession for self-reliance, we have a great constellation of satellites that cover the atmosphere, oceans, land, forestry, agriculture, and meteorology.”

Dr. Radhakrishnan said the Indian space program believes in international collaboration, and is guided by the philosophy that space research has a large role to play in the development of humanity.

Despite monumental achievements in space projects, however, India and ISRO are not the first names that come to mind in any discussion on space exploration. That honor has traditionally belonged to NASA and the former Soviet Russian space program rivalry and, in more recent years, to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. This is, however, changing rapidly, as India continues to disrupt several aspects of the space industry, not the least of them being costs.

SPACE STATION CAPABILITY

ISRO is focused on conducting five launches in as many months in 2018. The space agency has also awarded a contract to Arianespace to launch the 5.7-tonne GSAT-11 satellite from the European space consortium’s spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana by June 2018. On schedule are also 15 to 18 launches a year from 2019 onwards, according to current ISRO Chairman K. Sivan, who said the agency also has the capability to set up a space station.

Keeping costs low also serves a vital commercial purpose. Antrix Corporation Ltd., ISRO’s fledgling commercial arm, is competing with giants in the USD 335.5 billion global space industry.

Two remarkable achievements by India in space research have improved its credentials in the new ‘space race’ and forced the world to sit up and take notice. The big one that convinced everyone that the Indian space program meant business was the successful Mars Orbiter Mission, named Mangalyaan (literally translating to ‘Mars Vehicle’), in 2014.