INDIA'S SECOND SPACE AGE

1. Background

• The Space Age began in 1957 with the launch of satellite Sputnik 1 and in 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the world's first person in space.
• Neil Armstrong made history by walking on the moon in 1969. The First Space Age became reality.
• The Second Space Age is no precise date for its beginning, the contrast in today's space domain is stark.
• Between the 1950s to 1991, a period dominated by the Cold War, 60 to 120 space launches took place annually and 93 per cent of these were by the United States and the erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) governments.
• Three decades later, there are not only many more actors in the space scene, but a majority are also private companies.
• Last year, there were 180 rocket/space launches, 61 by Elon Musk's Space X; 90 per cent of global space launches since 2020 are by and for the private sector.

2. India's space journey 

• India's entry into the First Space Age in the 1960s. The first sounding rocket, a U.S.-supplied Nike Apache, with over 15, 000 employees and an annual budget between ₹ 14, 000 crore in recent years. Through these decades, it has sought to prioritise societal objectives and benefits.
• Its first major project was Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) that involved leasing a U.S. satellite in 197576 for educational outreach across 2,400 villages covering five million people.
• Satellite technology was a new mass communication tool. This led to the INSAT series in the 1980s, followed by GSAT, which provided the backbone for the country's telecommunication and broadcasting infrastructure.
• This was followed by remote sensing capability development. The use of space-based imagery for weather forecasting, resource mapping of forests, and analysing agricultural yields, groundwater and watersheds gradually expanded to cover fisheries and urban management.
• Following the Indian Remote Sensing Programme, this plan grew with the Oceansat and Cartosat series.
• The field of satellite-aided navigation emerged later. It began with GAGAN, a joint project between ISRO and the Airports Authority of India, to augment Global Positioning System (GPS) coverage of the region, to improve air traffic management over Indian airspace.
• This has now been expanded to a regional navigation satellite system called Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC).
• In parallel came the development of satellite launch capabilities. Beginning with the SLV1 in the 1980s, it took a decade before ISRO developed the PSLV series that has become its workhorse with over 50 successful launches.

3. Space Potential

• The origins of the Second Space Age can be traced to the Internet. In India, the process began accelerating as the 1990s saw the emergence of private TV channels and cable TV followed by direct-to-home transmissions.
• The demand for satellite transponders and ground-based services exploded. Today, more than half the transponders beaming into Indian homes are on foreign satellites.
• The last 15 years witnessed another transformation and this time India was in lockstep with the developed world.
• The age of mobile telephony, followed by smartphones has shown the world what a data-hungry and data-rich society India is.
• Broadband OTT and now 5G promise a double-digit annual growth in demand for satellite-based services.
• In 2020, the global space economy was estimated at $450 billion, growing to $ 600 billion by 2025.
• The Indian Space economy is estimated at $9.6 billion in 2020, which is expected to be $13 billion by 2025.
• However, the potential is much greater with an enabling policy and regulatory environment.
• The Indian space industry could easily exceed $60 billion by 2030, directly creating more than two lakh jobs.

4. India's space economy

• The reason is that in terms of end-user revenue, only a fifth is generated by the government.
• Media and entertainment account for 26 per cent of India's space economy, with consumer and retail services accounting for another 21 per cent.
• In terms of space activities downstream activities such as satellite services and the associated ground segment are dominant accounting for over 70 per cent of India's space economy; upstream activities of satellite manufacturing and launch services contribute to the smaller share. A similar trend can be seen in developed countries. 
• The reason is that India has been an early adopter of digital app-based services.
• The growing role of the private sector is also evident in the numbers and ownership of satellites.

5. Satellites in Space

• According to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), there are 8, 261 satellites in orbit, of which nearly 5, 000 are active.
• Till 2010, about 60 to 100 satellites were launched annually. The pace has picked up in recent years.
• In 2020, 1, 283 satellites were launched. Today, Starlink operates a constellation of over 3, 500 satellites and has a million paying customers.
• Both Starlink and One Web (in which Airtel has a stake) project constellations of 40, 000 satellites each.
• Jeff Bezos of Amazon has launched Project Kuiper to bring low-latency broadband connectivity around the globe.

5. Creating an enabling environment

• The Indian Private sector is responding to the demands of the second space age. From less than a dozen space startups five years ago, there are over 100 today.
•  The pace of investment is growing. From $3 million in 2018, it doubled in 2019 and crossed $65 million in 2021.
• The sector is poised for takeoff as a transformative growth multiplier like the IT industry did for the national economy in the 1990s.
• Today, ISRO manages four to five launches annually. It manages 53 operational satellites 21 for communication, 21 for earth observation, eight for navigation and the remaining as scientific experimental satellites (China operates 541).
•  In addition, ISRO has missions such as Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan and Gaganyaan (manned space mission).
• ISRO has always been an open organisation that has worked closely with the Indian Private Sector.
• However, for some private sector companies, space technology-related work is a small part of their revenue stream. They were content as vendors, producing to defined specs and designs.
• The startups are different. Their revenue stream depends on space-related activities and they need a different relationship with ISRO and the government.
• ISRO today is the operator, user, service provider, licensor, rule maker, and incubator.
• It has steered India through the First Space Age and needs to do what it can do best now with its resources and its high-quality manpower research.
• In 2017, the government introduced the first draft Space Activities Bill in Parliament but it lapsed in 2019.
• There has been talking about commercialising the PSLV and SSLV launch services and NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) was set up to replace Antrix.
• The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre (INSPACe) was set up in 2020 as a single window clearance for the private sector.
• However, whether it will emerge as the licensing authority or a regulator is unclear. An Indian Space Association (ISpA) was created as an industry association.
• In recent years, a series of policy papers have been circulated for discussion a satcom/telecom policy, an earth observation policy and a foreign direct investment policy.
• These have served a purpose. What is needed now is legislation (a space activities act).
• This provides the legal grounding that policy papers lack; helps set up a regulator authority and creates an enabling environment for raising venture capital funding into the Indian space startup industry.
• The window of opportunity for India to join the Second Space Age exists; it should not be lost.