The Rise of India's Private Space Firms | Momentum

Hot on the heels of dominant space players like the United States and Russia is a new kid on the block: India. India has officially joined the global space race with its Chandrayaan-3 mission, the first in the world to land near the rugged South Pole of the moon, a region believed to hold valuable resources like ice water. Topping off India's technological feat was the revelation that the project cost less than $75 million.

To put that into context, just imagine, Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster Dune: Part Two reportedly cost $190 million. Launching off its recent successes, India is planning human spaceflight missions and even its own space station next. I'm Haslinda Amin, and this is Momentum.

In every space epic, there is an origin story. And India's space ambitions began as a way of boosting its economy when the country was newly independent. Indian Space Research Organization or ISRO was founded in 1969 and its priority was developing space programs which would benefit India's people in their day-to-day lives like communications and meteorology.

ISRO's first satellite, Aryabhata, was launched in 1975. More satellites for space programs addressing India's needs like telecommunication, television broadcasting and disaster warnings were launched in the 1980s. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, influenced by China's space programs, ISRO began work on moon missions.

Then India launched its first lunar space probe Chandrayaan-1 in 2008, marking the country's shift towards more glamorous, high visibility space projects. But how is India blasting ahead with its space ambitions on a shoestring budget in an industry notorious for costing billions? I head to Bengaluru, often dubbed the space city of India, to find out more from Susmita Mohanty, a space entrepreneur and space diplomat.

India grabbed the world's attention with its mission to the moon. Yet, when you talk about the narrative around India's space sector, it is frugal engineering. What do you make of it?

I don't buy into the frugal engineering narrative really. Let's take the Mars mission. So we launched our orbiter to Mars in 2014.

And from the day the budget was approved, to the day we launched it, was all of 14 months. When you look at a NASA mission, a planetary mission, it takes a good six, seven years. So the Indian Space Agency, I would say, is an organization which has the kind of agility to make things happen on an accelerated timescale.

It's also because we have a very different design approach. For example, if NASA is designing a lander, their approach is as if you know, they're designing a Formula One car. But we, we are a more pragmatic country.

So we take, say, a Jeep approach. What we are looking for is a rugged, robust hardware that can make the landing. So it's much faster.

You compress the design cycles. So would you say that is what is cutting edge, - I would say so. - when it comes to India's space approach?

I think I would say that, in fact, if you think about it, it's a startup approach. When you look at these so called new space companies, like SpaceX, like Blue Origin, or any of our Indian companies like Skyroot or Pixxel, they're very agile. And they have a very organic way of problem solving.

So I think the Indian Space Agency has a lot of these characteristics of a startup. So they're not this clunky big bureaucracy that takes a while to build something. That is an advantage.

So strong government support, an agile design process and a bootstrapping mentality, go a long way in stretching space budgets. Case in point, ISRO was given $1. 5 billion for space missions in 2023, a mere fraction of NASA's $25.

4 billion and China's estimated space budget of $13 - 14 billion. Why does India need a space program? People often talk about how there are poor people to look after, starving people to feed, why a space program?

What's important to understand is that any country that chooses to have a space program, does it because space enables things here on Earth. Whether it's agriculture, resource management, urban planning, security, defense. So I think space is an enabler.

And a subcontinent the size of India with 1. 4 billion people, having a space program is a necessity. It's not a luxury.

Let's say we have a drought this year. If our farmers have to go out and apply for insurance, we have satellite imagery to prove. It literally boils down to impacting the lives and livelihoods of people at the grassroots level.

As India's space capabilities have grown, it’s space goals have expanded to developing satellites for military purposes. How much of it is geopolitics though? Is India's own aspirations, a counter to China's space programs?

Well I think everything is geopolitics. So space is also geopolitics. I would compare what China is doing in space terms with what the United States is doing.

And I think, at this point in time, I would say that China is the new superpower. In some ways it has already overtaken the United States. But if you look at India, yes, we do have our constellation of navigation satellites and Comsat and Earth observation satellites, which give us a strategic autonomy in terms of figuring out homeland security, defense, so there is that angle, but I don't think we are really mapping ourselves onto China.

I want to talk about India's space private sector. Pretty nascent but has come a long way. Your thoughts on how it's developed so far?

When you look at India's private sector, there are two kinds of companies. One, what we call legacy companies, companies like Godrej that builds rocket engines from the 70s, we have Tata Advanced Materials that does composites, HAL, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited right here in Bangalore, we have Taneja Aerospace also in Bangalore, they build everything from rocket fairings to the satellite bus. These are legacy companies that have been designing and building systems and subsystems to meet India's domestic mandate for decades now.

And then fast forward to now we have what we call new space companies, essentially startups. In Bangalore, right here in this city, we have at least a dozen startups which are working on cutting edge technology. The startups are adding to the momentum that has been built over the last 50-odd years.

The momentum of India's space tech development has also quickened, as India shifted from building space assets for its own needs, to opening up its space industry to private companies and foreign investment. Is space exploration the next gold rush? The global space market is worth an estimated $440 billion, and India's share of it right now is a mere 2%.

Since the private space sector in India opened up, hundreds of startups have sprung up to vie for a slice of the pie. But I wonder, what can Indian space startups do that SpaceX can't? I travel to Hyderabad, a tech industry hub and home to many Indian space startups.

One of them is Skyroot, which aims to make spaceflight affordable, reliable and regular. Pawan, Skyroot launched India's first private rocket in 2022, Vikram-S. - Yes.

- It’s also unveiled Vikram-1, - the second mission. - Yeah. Why is it significant?

I think Vikram-S is a major event in the space industry in India because it was done in record time of just two years. And it was India's and South Asia’s first rocket that went to space successfully at the very first attempt. So it really showed the potential of the Indian space sector, the speed and reliability of what we can execute in.

We are pushing the boundaries of technology, and making better solutions, bringing the cost down. And then, you know, transforming lives as a whole in this process. Pawan, what's the mission of Skyroot?

To put it in one line, our mission is to open space for all. Space transforms human lives. You know, through GPS communication, Earth observation.

Today, the access to space is very expensive, very limited to a few. So democratization of space. - Absolutely.

- Where are you with that? So we are just making baby steps. We launched the first rocket mission, which is India's and South Asia’s first rocket launch in the private sector in 2022.

Next, we are going to launch satellites to orbit, and then maybe at one point in time launch humans and cargo to space. Traditionally, in the aerospace industry, when people use metals like, you know, steel, aluminum, these are heavy metals. So we are going for carbon fiber, which is like super light, which is the material of the future.

You can put more payload to space with having an all-carbon fiber rocket. So that is one major technological advantage. And second is we use 3D printing.

So we are bringing down the months and years down to just a few days to manufacture and test a rocket engine. And you talk a lot about how you do it faster and you do it in a more cost effective way. How is it that India and how is it that Skyroot is able to do that?

So basically, the cost effectiveness is in the DNA, innovation is in the DNA and reliability is in the DNA. We don't want to waste a lot of hardware in getting lost, so we want to ensure that it's always working at the first time. So that saves cost.

The mindset of efficiency, you know, utilizing less resources, being more resourceful. All this comes in the culture, in the DNA in which we are brought up with. With the global space launch market projected to hit $47 billion by 2032, innovation and resourcefulness coupled with speed are necessary for Indian companies like Skyroot.

When we started Skyroot, there were slightly over a thousand satellites, right now there are 10,000 satellites. So just within the last 5-6 years, there is 10X growth in the number of satellites in space, and it's going to explode even further in the future. So that's where there's huge demand for launch of satellites.

It's a very underserved market because building rockets and launching is very complex, very difficult, very few companies are able to do it. That's what we found is an opportunity for Skyroot, and we want to be one of the top few players in the world and grow the space economy as a whole. But for Skyroot to soar to new heights, they'll need to demonstrate orbital launch capabilities to truly compete with further-along American and Chinese space companies.

We want to start launching customer requirements, customer payloads to orbit, and I think that's a very important phase to do more launches and make it sustainable and maybe go profitable in the next few years. We want to widen to even be able to launch even bigger satellites. We want to be able to even launch large cargo or even, you know, humans to space.

What we are starting off is the smaller vehicles, which will launch small satellites. The rocket is a seven story building tall rocket. The core structure of the rocket is completely built in-house.

And then we have like a support system of hundreds of suppliers to build the rest of the rocket. To really open space for all, we need to build rockets, which are so cheap, they should be like aircrafts, you hop onto them and then you have to reuse them. Going to space should become as easy as, you know, taking a flight.

But SpaceX, which is on track to complete 135 launches by the end of 2024, rules the rocket industry. Can an Indian startup really compete? SpaceX remains the cheapest option.

- Yeah. - Will you get there? Space X is a different solution where they're more like a train to go to space where they can launch large amount of payloads.

We are more like cabs that go to space. So just like booking a cab, you book your rocket and you go to exactly where you want and whenever you want. Right?

So among the cabs to go to space, we will be the most competitive. We’ll have a different set of customers, which we serve. We want to be the most competitive player in that segment.

Your mantra is build it fast, test it faster, and as you said, you have hundreds of suppliers. How do you ensure that all your suppliers are also adhering to that mantra? You have a very strong quality team.

And also we hand hold a lot of suppliers to see because space is very unforgiving. Even probably a bolt failure can cause a rocket failure. So we are like very quality conscious.

Pawan believes the exponential growth in India's space sector will be driven by lower costs and wider access to technologies. I think the space sector is at its beginning phase. So I think there will be extraordinary growth over the years; as the costs go low, more and more people get into the sector, and more and more services to get into.

And we will get probably very low cost internet for 50% of the world population through broadband internet directly from satellites. All this is going to happen in the next decade. And for India, we have extraordinary talent, which is growing year by year.

Every year, 15 million engineers pass out of Indian colleges. This is like the fuel for the space industry. A lot of talent in the sector, which can be tapped.

For India’s space economy to flourish in the coming decade, a steady pipeline of talent is needed. I travel to the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, or IIAP, in Bengaluru, to see where young minds are shaped by real world research. We talk about how you need young talent to ensure that India fulfills its space ambitions.

How do you think this institute helps to develop talent for the future? We access a bridge to transfer the knowledge to the student community. For the student programs, we help them in designing the things.

Then we help them in qualifying their payloads to meet the harsh space environments. And we offer our laboratories to test, integrate, assemble their payloads and qualify for the space conditions. The IIAP also supports Indian space startups in designing, developing, testing and placing their payloads on satellite launch vehicles.

This wide ranging collaboration between academia, industry and research institutions, provides fuel for India's space tech development to accelerate. Take Bengaluru-based space data company Pixxel for example, the five-year-old startup may not have come about if not for its co-founder, Awais, getting the opportunity to design and build his first satellite at a college program run by ISRO. Today, Pixxel builds hyperspectral imaging satellites, which can monitor the health of the planet above and below the Earth's surface.

Awais, I’m really excited to be here to get the first peek at your newest satellite, the Firefly. Yeah, so happy to be unveiling Firefly. This is what we are calling the commercial satellites that we are launching later this year and the constellation of six of them that will go up in the next few months.

Whereas the human eye sees colors of visible light in mainly three bands, red, green and blue, Firefly’s cameras capture and split light into more than 250 bands, far beyond those typically observed by conventional satellite imaging systems. So your customers can benefit in what ways? I mean, how does it serve them with the data that you collect?

So, for example, if you're looking at a farm, instead of just being able to identify how healthy the soil is, we can go way beyond that with a hyperspectral sensor to be able to see what nutrients are present in the soil, what species of crop is growing down there below? What disease or pest infestation might be present there. So what exactly does Pixxel do?

We know the mantra is to create a better life on Earth. How are you doing that with your technology? The goal is to build a health monitor for the planet, to see what's happening, on this one planet that we call home, like we would generally do for our own bodies and take care of it.

As a college student, the idea was, let's see if we can use existing data that's coming down from satellites already in orbit. Analyze that data to extract useful insights for farmers, for people trying to detect pollution levels. When you looked at all of this satellite imagery, you could see some things, but there was a lot to be desired.

For example, if we wanted to detect a crop disease that was ravaging a part of the farmland somewhere, we couldn't see that. And half a trillion dollars worth of crops are lost every year, just because we're not able to catch pest infestations or crop diseases in time. And that was the genesis of the idea.

If existing data from space won't cut it, let’s build and deploy our own constellation of these hyperspectral imaging satellites. Pixxel was at the right place at the right time. NASA had proven the usefulness of hyperspectral imaging on a previous mission.

If there is demand for hyperspectral data, why has there been a vacuum? Why hasn't there been a player, for example, in the US, which has been in the space business for a very long time? So I think if you look at any of these niche or critical technologies, especially in space, it usually follows a pattern of a curve.

It's space agencies and organizations that spend decades and hundreds of millions of dollars in building the new technology for the first time, and then it starts getting commercialized once people see the value in it. The NASA satellite was not good enough for commercial users. Now the challenge for private entities was can we figure out how to make it have a much better resolution?

Can we figure out if we can do it at ten times or 100 times less the cost? And then can we put it out there in a few months rather than the many years it would take. When you ask the question, why were there no touchscreen mobiles before the iPhone in 2007?

There was no technology to sort of enable that a few years before that. Pixxel may be a young startup, but it has already raised more than $71 million in funding to advance its satellite technology. Its applications span multiple industries, from farming to oil and gas.

We work with a lot of oil and gas companies to help restrict their impact on the environment. If you're looking at an underground oil leak that's invisible because it's underground, but it ends up changing the chemical composition of the soil, which we can pick up from our satellites. We work with governments across the world to help with deforestation.

We also work with carbon credits, we can identify if a particular part of the forest is sequestering a certain amount of carbon. We help governments make sure that everyone's adhering to the UN norms and behaving as good actors. Ten years down the road, how do you see satellite imaging benefiting the world?

Paint a picture for us. In ten years, someone should just be able to pick up a phone, type in, “Tell me what the water quality index for the lakes in Bangalore. ” And our models and data will sort of compute that in the back end and provide the report that is needed for identifying the water quality or someone could just type in, “Give me the rough estimate for the yield of rice in India for this year.

” The models that we have will be able to compute and send it out. Democratizing this in truly a fashion which each and every person in the world can just pick up the phone, log into an app, and search for this data brings in, I think, just a more transparent and information led world. How do you see companies like Pixxel advancing India's space ambitions?

India is definitely the new kid on the block with regards to the private space sector only opened up over the last 3-4 years. Most of the startups are working on this are not more than 5 or 6 years old. People can go into building robotics.

People can go into building aerospace. Something that would have been like a dream forever for most people is now starting to become a reality. In the case of Pixxel itself, right, we started it when we were 21 years old.

Obviously a lot has been learned since then. We have tempered that with experienced folks, but most of our folks are still under 30. India has always been known traditionally for being a low-cost provider of things, but the new age startups that are coming up are building technologies that are being tested for the first time.

Whether that's newly 3D printed rocket engines or building hyperspectral satellites of a resolution and quality that have not been provided before. It's not just about providing components and services and solutions to India, but at the same time built in India for the world. A young, skilled population, government reforms to open up its space sector to the world, new startups hungry for success, These factors may well be what India needs to become a bigger player in the global space economy, which is estimated to triple to $1.

8 trillion by 2035. India's space ambitions are reaching new heights, with each mission propelling its reputation further into the cosmos. Check out our next Momentum episode.