Artist’s rendition of satellites orbiting the Earth – rottenman/123RF Stock Photo
Two interesting developments from India over the last week, looking at the first successful commercial rocket launch showing how the country’s private sector is getting involved in space and secondly reports showing the potential impact of this.
India’s First Commercial Satellite Launch
On the 18th July, the Indian company Skyroot Aerospace Private Limited successfully launched the country’s first private launch facility when the rocket, Vikram-1, went into orbit. The test flight took place at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre and had the name Mission Aagaman, which is Sanskrit for ‘arrival’. The rocket reached a 450 km low-Earth orbit and then successful deployed several payloads:
- Two technology demonstration payloads from German aerospace company DCUBED;
- Solaras S3 nanosatellite from Indian startup Grahaa Space. SOLARAS has been built to test Grahaa Space’s satellite platform and onboard systems in orbit, as the company has the ambition of streaming near-real-time geospatial Earth Observation videos.
- Embrace, a robotic arm built by the Indian company Cosmoserve Space to capture space debris. While the soft robotic capture system withstood the launch and most systems were working as expected; the robotic petals, which were supposed to open, could not do so due to an unusual settling of the petals. The reasons for this will be investigated, and the missions has provided validation testing and data that was simply not possible on the ground.
- SCOPE Skyroot’s own in-house technology-demonstration satellite, which collected a variety of data to help the company assess the rocket’s performance.
The mission also carried symbolic items:
- A lotus flower made of lab-grown diamonds, called ‘Cosmic Bloom’, developed by Cosmos Diamonds as an artistic tribute to space.
- A tiny 18-carot gold rocket from artist Ajay Kumar Mattewada containing micro-sculptures of three of India’s most celebrated scientists — Nobel Prize-winning physicist C.V. Raman, aerospace engineer and former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, and Vikram Sarabhai, the father of India’s space program for whom the rocket is named. Each sculpture is smaller than a grain of rice.
- A handwritten postcard from India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, bearing the words “Vande Mataram”, a phrase from India’s national song that translates as ‘I bow to thee, Mother’.
This makes India one of a handful of countries with private commercial launch facilities including the United States, China, and New Zealand. It is expected that a series of further test flights will be undertaken in the coming months, before moving towards the aim of offering commercial launch flights.
Knowledge Loss for ISRO
As a juxtaposition to the first half of this article, other reports last week highlighted that over 100 people had left the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in recent months, and the Department of Space issued a directive on the 14th July telling ISRO space centres to not routinely accept resignation or voluntary retirement requests from scientific and technical personnel related to certain critical missions.
This loss of knowledge and experience is impacting some of ISRO’s projects and the new instructions indicate that personal of the rank scientist and engineer, should be sent with ‘clear recommendations’ from their directors for scrutiny by the Department of Space before a final decision is taken.
It is suggested that the opportunities offered by the developing private sector may well be a driver, both directly and indirectly, for these staff leaving ISRO.
Summary
It is fantastic to see India successfully complete its inaugural commercial satellite launch and it will be exciting to see the future test flights for the Vikram rocket and see it turn into a commercial offering and having the potential to offer satellite launch alternatives to the main SpaceX and Rocket Lab solutions. However, the space industry is still a relative niche industry, and there are a limited number of people around with knowledge and skills and therefore if people join the private sector they must come from somewhere, which could explain, at least, some of the job losses at ISRO. The two sectors will need to work together to develop the skills, knowledge and people resources for them both to thrive in the future.
