Indian Space Program – UPSC IAS

• The Indian space programme applies rockets and satellites to national development, and it has grown from a sounding rocket at Thumba in 1963 to lunar landings and a private orbital launch in 2026.
• It reads well through a possibilistic approach: technology widens the choices open to a society within the limits set by its environment.
• It is a tool for regional development, since satellites reach remote, hilly and island areas that ground networks serve poorly.
• Its services work alongside the optical fibre and wireless systems of the communication network.
• It forms part of India’s wider science and technology effort, with ISRO as one of its leading institutions.

Organisation and Objectives

Objectives of the Indian Space Programme

• The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is the nodal agency and flag bearer of the programme, under the Department of Space (DoS).
  • Beyond building and launching missions and launch vehicles, ISRO offers a wide range of services and supports science and science education.
  • Research centres and autonomous institutions in remote sensing, astronomy and astrophysics, atmospheric sciences and space sciences function under the Department.
• The objectives are twofold:
  • Space discovery and exploration through missions.
  • Promotion of research and education in space science, for example tele-education in remote areas.
• Other functions:
  • Resource management, covering minerals, agriculture and marine resources.
  • Environment conservation.
  • Internal security and counter-terrorism, for example the use of IRNSS for regional security.
  • Weather forecasting.
  • Disaster management.

Geography of the Space Establishment

• Why Thumba: it lies close to the magnetic equator, which suits the study of the upper atmosphere. It was chosen as an international sounding-rocket site.
• Why Sriharikota: this island on the east coast, about 80 km north of Chennai, allows eastward launches over the sea, helped by the Earth’s rotation at a low latitude.
  • It began operating in 1971 with a Rohini-125 sounding rocket. It was renamed after Prof. Satish Dhawan, who carried forward the work of Vikram Sarabhai.
• Why Kulasekarapattinam: this site in Thoothukudi district, Tamil Nadu, is meant for polar launches of the SSLV and for private rockets.
• Ground stations of ISTRAC include Lucknow, Port Blair and Thiruvananthapuram, with others in Mauritius, Brunei and Biak (Indonesia).

Launch Vehicles

• The launch vehicle programme grew through sounding rockets, SLV, ASLV, PSLV, GSLV and LVM3, each of these satellite launch vehicles building on the last.

• The figure gives early design values. Current lift-off masses are about 320 t (PSLV-XL), 420 t (GSLV) and 640 t (LVM3), as the table shows.

• Sounding rockets are one- or two-stage solid rockets that probe the upper atmosphere and test parts for bigger vehicles.
  • The first came from abroad. RH-75, of 75 mm diameter, was the first truly Indian one, flown from Thumba in 1967.
  • RH-100, 125, 200, 300 and 560 followed, and over 1,000 have flown. ISRO flew 12 Rohini flights in 2025.
• PSLV became the workhorse, carrying remote-sensing, navigation and small foreign satellites. It lifted 104 satellites on 15 February 2017.
  • Two straight failures followed, both in the third stage: PSLV-C61 (18 May 2025) and PSLV-C62 (12 January 2026).
  • A National Level Expert Committee is reviewing them, and no PSLV had flown again by 30 October 2026.
• GSLV made India self-reliant in launching communication and navigation satellites. Its cryogenic upper stage was the hard step.
• LVM3 carried Chandrayaan-2 and Chandrayaan-3, and two OneWeb missions of 72 satellites.
  • CMS-03, about 4,400 kg, was the heaviest satellite sent to GTO from Indian soil (2 November 2025).
  • BlueBird Block-2, a satellite of about 6 tonnes for the American firm AST SpaceMobile, became the heaviest launched from India (24 December 2025).
• Launch pads at Sriharikota:
  • First Launch Pad: PSLV and SSLV, and Vikram-1 in 2026.
  • Second Launch Pad: GSLV and LVM3, including the human-rated LVM3.
  • Third Launch Pad: approved on 16 January 2025 at ₹3,984.86 crore, to be ready within four years, for next-generation vehicles.
• New launch site: the foundation stone at Kulasekarapattinam was laid on 28 February 2024, and that of its launch pad on 27 August 2025. Completion is targeted for the end of 2026.
• Next-generation technology:
  • Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV): approved in September 2024 at about ₹8,240 crore, to lift up to 30 tonnes to LEO.
  • Semi-cryogenic and LOX-methane engines: the first ignition of a full-scale gas generator for the 1,100 kN LOX-methane engine came on 9 October 2026.
  • Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology Demonstrator: flown on 23 May 2016. Scramjet Engine Technology Demonstrator: flown on 28 August 2016.

Satellites and Their Applications

Communication Satellites: INSAT and GSAT

• The Indian National Satellite (INSAT) system is one of the largest domestic communication satellite systems in the Asia-Pacific region, placed in geostationary orbit. It serves telecommunications, television and meteorology together.
• A transponder receives radio signals from the ground and retransmits them. INSAT-1 offered 12 transponders and about 4,300 two-way telephone circuits for national coverage.

• Operational roster: an older count listed 14 satellites: INSAT-3A, 3C, 4A, 4B, 4CR and 3DR, and GSAT-6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15 and 16, of which nine were then described as operational in geostationary orbit.
  • ISRO’s October 2026 list marks 19 communication satellites as operational, from GSAT-10 to CMS-03. INSAT-3A, 3C, 4A, 4B, 4CR, GSAT-8 and GSAT-12 have left service.
• Applications of INSAT:
  • Educational television services, as with EDUSAT (2004), meant to offset the shortage of qualified teachers.
  • Telemedicine.
  • Television.
  • Satellite-aided search and rescue.
  • Disaster management.
  • Geopolitics, as with the South Asia Satellite (GSAT-9, 5 May 2017), first planned as a SAARC satellite.
  • Commercialisation, as with launches of communication satellites for foreign customers, including American firms.
• Roots in development: Sarabhai took part in an early study with NASA on using satellites for direct television broadcasting. This led to the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE, 1975–76).

Remote Sensing Satellites: IRS

• Early experiments: Bhaskara-I (7 June 1979) and Bhaskara-II (20 November 1981) studied land use, forests, Himalayan snow cover, drought-prone areas and geological structure.
• Starting with IRS-1A on 17 March 1988, which carried Linear Imaging Self-Scanning Sensors, ISRO has built one of the largest remote-sensing constellations in operation.
• Families of satellites: the Cartosat, Oceansat, Resourcesat and Radar Imaging Satellite (RISAT) series. RISAT carries radar that sees through cloud, while Resourcesat is an optical series for natural resources.

• EOS-05 replaced the lost EOS-03 of 12 August 2021, and reached a near-geostationary orbit of 34,903 km by 35,884 km by 7 September 2026.
• Losses: RISAT-1B (EOS-09) was lost on PSLV-C61, and Anvesha (EOS-N1) on PSLV-C62.
• Applications of IRS:
  • Disaster management support: after the Dharali flash flood in Uttarkashi on 5 August 2025, Cartosat images gave a damage assessment within two days.
    • ISRO also took the lead of the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters for six months from April 2025.
  • Weather: INSAT-3D outgoing longwave data can flag lightning about 2.5 hours ahead.
  • Bio-resources and environmental survey and mapping, for example Resourcesat.
  • Cartography, for example Cartosat.
  • Agriculture and soil: the CROP framework tracked wheat sowing in major growing States in the rabi season of 2024–25, using EOS-04, EOS-06 and Resourcesat-2A.
  • Rural and urban development, for example the National Drinking Water Mission.

Satellite Navigation: IRNSS and NavIC

• The Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), now Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC), gives position, navigation and timing over India and about 1,500 km beyond.
  • It was planned as a constellation of seven satellites with a ground segment. The need for an independent system was felt during the Kargil conflict of 1999.
• First generation: IRNSS-1A (1 July 2013) to IRNSS-1G (28 April 2016). IRNSS-1H failed on 31 August 2017 and IRNSS-1I replaced it on 12 April 2018.
• Second generation, the NVS series, adds the civil L1 signal to L5 and S.
  • NVS-01: 29 May 2023.
  • NVS-02: 29 January 2025, on the 100th launch from Sriharikota. It reached transfer orbit but could not raise its orbit, because the drive signal failed to reach a pyro valve.
  • NVS-03: 30 October 2026 on GSLV-F18, the 20th GSLV flight. It weighs about 2,250 kg and carries an indigenous atomic clock, and it still has to raise its orbit and enter service.
  • NVS-04 and NVS-05 are in advanced stages of realisation.
• Status: a Lok Sabha reply of July 2026 said only three satellites (IRNSS-1B, IRNSS-1I and NVS-01) gave navigation service, while at least four are needed for positioning.
  • The onboard clock of IRNSS-1F stopped on 13 March 2026. Older satellites carry on with messaging and disaster alerts, and the timing service continues.
  • Atomic clock failures and launch losses caused this gap, so NavIC remains strategically valuable but operationally incomplete.

Important Milestones

Early Rocketry and Phase I: 1960–70 (Incipient Stage)

• Rockets used by the Mysore armies against the British inspired William Congreve’s rocket of 1804.
• Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai (1919–1971) was the founding father of the programme and a scientific visionary. He founded a cosmic-ray laboratory, and Homi Jehangir Bhabha (1909–1966) also worked on cosmic rays in the 1940s.
• After Sputnik in 1957, Sarabhai saw the potential of satellites. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who saw science as essential to the country’s future, placed space research under the Department of Atomic Energy in 1961.
• Bhabha, who headed the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and is regarded as the father of India’s atomic programme, set up INCOSPAR, the Indian National Committee for Space Research, in 1962, with Sarabhai as its Chairman.
• The programme began with sounding rockets from the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) near Thiruvananthapuram in south Keralam (Kerala).
• India developed its own Rohini family of sounding rockets, and the Thumba complex became the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre.
• ISRO was created in 1969, and the Department of Space in 1972.

Phase II: 1970–80

• India began building satellite technology, anticipating its future needs in remote sensing and communication.
• Aryabhata, its first satellite, went up on a Soviet booster in 1975.
• By 1979 the SLV was ready at the new Sriharikota Rocket Launching Station (SRLS). The first launch that year failed, through a control failure in the second stage.
• By 1980 the fault was cured, and Rohini became the first satellite that India put into orbit with its own launcher. SLV-3 made India the sixth space-faring nation.

Phase III: 1980–90

• ISRO then wanted a launch vehicle that could put a truly useful satellite into polar orbit.
• The Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle (ASLV) was tested in 1987, and the launch failed. Another attempt in 1988, after minor corrections, also failed.

Phase IV: 1990–2000

• The first successful ASLV launch came in 1992.
• The PSLV first succeeded in 1994. It went on to place remote-sensing and communication satellites into orbit, building a large cluster and supplying data for Indian industry and agriculture.
• In 1999 PSLV carried foreign satellites from Germany and Korea for the first time, as co-passengers.

Developments after 2000

• The first development flight of the GSLV came in 2001.
• Chandrayaan-1, an uncrewed probe to the Moon, flew in 2008 as the first step in exploring the solar system.
• ISRO entered the lucrative market of launching foreign payloads from Indian soil. 434 foreign satellites had been launched by January 2026, 399 of them after 2014.
• After 2010 the work ran along three lines:
  • Launch vehicles: PSLV, GSLV and the next-generation GSLV Mark III.
  • Earth observation: Resourcesat, Cartosat, Oceansat, Radar Imaging Satellite and Geo-Imaging Satellite, and weather and climate satellites such as INSAT-3DR.
  • Satellite navigation: the seven-satellite IRNSS with its ground segment.

Dateline of the Indian Space Programme

• The chart stops at 2019. INSAT-1A (1982) opened the INSAT series, while INSAT-2A was the first of the indigenous second generation. GSAT-29 has since been overtaken as the heaviest satellite from India, by CMS-03 and BlueBird Block-2, and the 104-satellite record has been passed abroad.

Science, Exploration and Crewed Flight

• Since 2008 the important missions of ISRO and its major milestones have reached the Moon, Mars and the Sun, using the orbits and satellite types of space technology.

Moon, Mars and Sun

• Chandrayaan-1 cost only ₹386 crore. Contact was lost in late August 2009, after it had met most of its goals in place of a planned two-year life.
• Mars Orbiter Mission weighed 1,337 kg at lift-off. It spent about a month in Earth orbit, raising its orbit in steps, before leaving for Mars. It was tracked from ISTRAC with the Indian Deep Space Network.
• Chandrayaan-2 was launched by GSLV with an orbiter, a lander and a rover.

Human Spaceflight

• Gaganyaan: in September 2024 the Cabinet allotted ₹20,193 crore for eight missions under the human spaceflight programme.
  • G1, the first uncrewed flight carrying the half-humanoid Vyommitra, was targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026 in a Rajya Sabha reply of 6 August 2026.
  • Two more uncrewed flights are targeted by 2027, before the first crewed orbital mission.
• Vehicle: the human-rated LVM3 (HLVM3) stands 53 m tall, weighs 640 tonnes and can lift about 10 tonnes to LEO.
• Tests so far: the TV-D1 crew escape test, integrated air drop tests on 24 August 2025 and in April 2026, and crew module separation tests reported in October 2026. Ground tests had passed 8,000.
• Crew: Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair, Angad Pratap, Ajit Krishnan and Shubhanshu Shukla were named on 27 February 2024.
  • Shukla became the first Indian aboard the International Space Station on Axiom-4 (25 June to 15 July 2025), and the second Indian in space after Rakesh Sharma, who flew on the 1984 Indo-Soviet mission.

Roadmap

Policy and the Private Sector

• Space sector reforms of 2020 ended the near-monopoly of government, and ISRO now reports more than 440 space start-ups (August 2026), from single digits before.
• Institutions:
  • NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), incorporated on 6 March 2019, is ISRO’s commercial arm. Antrix Corporation also sits under the Department.
  • IN-SPACe, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre at Ahmedabad, is the single-window autonomous agency that promotes, authorises and supervises private activity and shares ISRO facilities.
• Indian Space Policy, 2023 allows private entities to carry out end-to-end activities.
  • ISRO shifts its focus to research and development of advanced technology and new systems.
  • IN-SPACe authorises, NSIL commercialises, and the Department of Space provides overall direction.
• Foreign investment (21 February 2024): automatic route up to 74% for satellite manufacture and operation and data products, 49% for launch vehicles and spaceports, and 100% for components and systems.
• Funding: a ₹1,000 crore venture capital fund (approved 24 October 2024) and a ₹500 crore Technology Adoption Fund. Private investment rose from US$ 100.5 million in 2021–22 to US$ 618.5 million by March 2026.
• Private launches:
  • Skyroot’s Vikram-S, a suborbital test (18 November 2022).
  • Agnikul’s Agnibaan SOrTeD from its own pad at Sriharikota (30 May 2024).
  • Skyroot’s Vikram-1 on 18 July 2026, the first orbital launch from Indian soil by a private company, on its first attempt from the First Launch Pad.
• Handover to industry:
  • PSLV: a contract with the HAL and L&T consortium for five PSLV-XL vehicles. Stacking of the first, PSLV-N1, had begun by March 2026.
  • SSLV: full technology transfer to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, signed on 10 September 2025.
  • Earth observation: a Pixxel-led consortium will invest over ₹1,200 crore in 12 satellites under public-private partnership.
• Space economy: about US$ 8.4 billion on the January 2026 government estimate and about US$ 9 billion on that of August 2026, with US$ 40–45 billion expected within a decade.
• Regional effect: clusters are forming around Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Thiruvananthapuram, and Gujarat has a Space Park on offer.

Space and National Security

• Gains:
  • Independent navigation through NavIC.
  • Secure communication and maritime reach, as with CMS-03 (GSAT-7R), which serves a wide oceanic region.
  • Surveillance through radar and optical satellites.
  • An anti-satellite capability, shown against Microsat-R in March 2019.
• Concerns with private entry:
  • Control of dual-use technology and high-resolution imagery.
  • Foreign ownership and data security, which explains the sector-wise FDI caps.
  • Absence of a space activities law, so that IN-SPACe rests on policy and not on statute.
  • Space debris and crowded orbits.
• Vulnerabilities shown recently: the two PSLV failures and the NavIC shortfall show how much depends on launch reliability and timely replacement.