You’d be forgiven if you had no idea India had a space program; it’s still in its fledgling stages, but it’s come incredibly far in a short amount of time. Yesterday, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) made history, launching a record-breaking 104 satellites aboard a single rocket.
The origins of the Indian space program date back to the 1920s and 30s, but the ISRO in its current form was established in 1969. The first Indian satellite, Aryabhata, was launched into space aboard a Russian rocket in 1975. The aim was to give the ISRO experience in building and launching a satellite. In 1980, the first Indian rocket carrying an Indian-made satellite, Rohini, was launched; this was also an experimental satellite. Rohini’s successful launch made India the sixth country in the world with the technology to launch craft into space.
The year 1984 saw the first Indian citizen soar into space. Rakesh Sharma left our planet aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule, which launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, then in the U.S.S.R., in a joint partnership between ISRO and Intercosmos, the Soviet Union’s space organization. (Intercosmos is now called Roscosmos). Sharma spent seven days aboard the Russian space station Salyut 7 conducting scientific experiments.
In 2008, India launched an unmanned lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, from its Satish Dhawan Space Center spaceport, located on a barrier island of South India. The spacecraft housed 11 different scientific instruments built by various countries (from India to Bulgaria to the United States) and orbited the moon over 3,400 times. ISRO lost contact with the spacecraft in late 2009. The ISRO plans to send a second spacecraft, Chandrayaan-2, to the moon in 2018.
India also had the distinction of launching Asia’s first successful Mars orbiter, the Mars Orbiter Mission, nicknamed Mangalyaan, on November 5, 2013. It reached the red planet just under one year later. It was the least expensive mission to Mars in history, with a rough price tag of just $74 million. NASA’s comparable Mars orbiter, MAVEN, cost $671 million, though MAVEN had significantly more capabilities than Mangalyaan.
ISRO’s sights are set high, but in between launching orbiters to other worlds, India’s space program has focused on increasing their launch capabilities. They’ve been building bigger and more sophisticated rockets capable of taking larger payloads to space. The ISRO has made a name for itself with its ability to deploy multiple satellites with one launch. This means that ISRO can launch their own satellites into space and sell the extra rocket space to third-party consumers, whether private companies or other countries. It’s an important cost saving measure for an organization that has been heavily criticized domestically for its spending, given India’s poverty rate.
India can accomplish this using the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), a reliable workhorse of a rocket that was responsible for the launch of both the lunar and Martian orbiters. Operating since 1993, it had put 122 satellites successfully into orbit before February 14, 2017, with 38 straight successful missions.
That number, 122 total satellites, should put ISRO’s accomplishment yesterday into perspective: In one launch, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle carried 104 satellites into orbit on a single rocket. These satellites weren’t just Indian: the PSLV carried spacecraft from companies located within the Netherlands, Switzerland, Israel, and even the United States.
The primary objective of yesterday’s mission was to launch the CartoSat-2D spacecraft, which is a satellite intended to study India. Using the CartoSat-2D, the Indian government can monitor land use and use its data for urban and rural planning projects. It took up over half the rocket’s payload weight.
Of the remaining space and weight available, the bulk of the payload belonged to a U.S. company called Planet, with ambitions to monitor the Earth from space. These satellites are tiny, which is how so many of them (88) were able to fit on one rocket. To reduce costs, the company buys space on missions that are already launching, like the February 14 PSLV launch. The collaboration was arranged by rocket crowdsharing company Innovative Solutions in Space.
With this record-setting launch, India has confirmed that not only are its spaceflight capabilities robust, but that its future in space is promising. What will be next for India, and where will it go from here? Will we see a manned Indian space mission in the next decade?
Swapna Krishna is a freelance writer, editor, and giant space and sci-fi geek. You can find her on Twitter at @skrishna.
half of me wants to cheer the Indian space program -talk about ‘better, faster, cheaper’ – but the other half of me always wondered what the hell: India has literally millions of people suffering from malnutrition, tenure on a few feet of sidewalk is an inheritable asset for many people, and they’re spending tends of millions of $ on increasing their heavy lift capacity?
It’s a sorta shockingly callous wait to say they just don’t care at all about people dying in the fields and slums. (The US is kinda guilty of the same thing, but it is qualitatively a vastly smaller scale than in India).
The current state that India is in right now, overshadows this achievement. Hell, even in the country itsef more than half of the population is not even aware of this event. There is communalism and politics trenched deeply in the cities and villages of India. At present, the country is being ruled by morons who are dragging the entire nation back to thee dark ages for their own selfish goals.
Satellites? This launch is not about satellites at all. India is a nuclear armed state. This is a statement to the rest of the world. They have a launch vehicle and a missile system that can hit the rest of the world with a single launch. This is the sort of thing that is North Korea did it then we’d lose our collective fecal material in terror (remember the freak out when NK managed to launch a broken sputnik?); this is a big statement about India’s place on the global stage.
It is also a start warning of what the US could become under Trump. A few hi-tech centers, but the rest of the country living in poverty and destitution due to crumbling infrastructure, corruption in high office, and political neglect with a nasty dose of Heinlein-esque libertarianism underlying it all.
It seems that those contrasting the spending on science and technology with that of other problems in India
like poverty, poor healthcare and so on tend to forget that the former also help in tackling the later problems. Moreover
ISRO (which does the space related activities in India) has an yearly budget of less than 0.05 percent of total GDP.
The other issues like education, clean air, water, energy, affordable healthcare are being tackled albeit slowly but it
is natural in a democracy so large and diverse.
Its sickening to hear that people relate the Indian space achievement to poverty in india. These 2 are different aspects, had the ISRO not been there the costs incurred by the state and people on tele communications, weather forecasting, disaster management and prominently Television broadcasting would have been great. Every rupee spent on ISRO had develivered in returns of 10x to 100x times.
Poverty alleviation is a continuous process in India it can’t be removed overnight and with the advent of IT and other software related industry the inequalities are increasing simultaneously it is bringing wider fabric of the people into the urban middle class.
Stop lecturing on people living below $1 and the other stuff….the budget allocation to ISRO is less $170 million….now it is capable of earning its expenditure to a great extent.
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