ISRO and the Quiet Rise of Indian Space Science

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On 23 August 2023, a lander named Vikram touched down near the lunar south pole and India became the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the Moon and the first to do so in that region. The achievement drew global attention partly because of where it landed and partly because of what it cost: the Chandrayaan 3 mission was carried out on a budget widely reported to be smaller than that of several Hollywood films about space. That combination, technically serious and financially frugal, is the signature of the Indian Space Research Organisation.

Origins in a fishing village

Indian space activity began with sounding rockets launched from Thumba, a coastal village near Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala chosen because it sits close to the magnetic equator. The Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station saw its first launch in November 1963, a small American Nike Apache rocket, and the early operation famously used a converted church building as a workshop and offices, with components sometimes transported by bicycle and bullock cart. The organising figure was the physicist Vikram Sarabhai, who had founded the Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad in 1947 and who argued that a poor country was justified in a space programme only if it applied space technology to real national problems.

That argument shaped everything afterwards. ISRO was formed in 1969 and placed under a Department of Space reporting directly to the Prime Minister. Its early priorities were communications and remote sensing rather than prestige. The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment of 1975 and 1976 used a loaned American satellite to broadcast educational programming to thousands of villages, a genuinely pioneering exercise in development communication. The first Indian built satellite, Aryabhata, was launched by a Soviet rocket in April 1975. India's first successful indigenous orbital launch came in July 1980, when the SLV 3 placed the Rohini satellite in orbit, a project whose team included A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, later President of India.

The workhorses and the hard problem

The organisation's reputation rests less on spectacular missions than on two vehicles. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, first successful in 1994, became one of the most reliable small and medium launchers in the world, with a long run of consecutive successes and a business launching satellites for foreign customers, including a single 2017 mission that deployed more than a hundred satellites at once. The Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle was much harder, because placing heavy communications satellites in geostationary orbit requires a cryogenic upper stage burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. India sought this technology from Russia in the early 1990s, and the transfer was blocked under pressure from the United States, which cited missile technology control commitments. ISRO spent roughly two decades developing an indigenous cryogenic engine, achieving reliable flights in the 2010s and then the heavier LVM3, the vehicle that carried Chandrayaan 3.

Alongside launchers sit the application satellites that justify the programme domestically. The INSAT and GSAT series carry television, telephony and, importantly, cyclone warning and disaster communication. The Indian Remote Sensing series supports crop forecasting, groundwater mapping, forest cover assessment and urban planning. NavIC, the regional navigation system built after the Kargil conflict of 1999 highlighted the risk of depending on foreign positioning signals, provides coverage over India and the surrounding region. These are not headline missions, but they are the reason a space budget survives scrutiny in a country with large unmet development needs.

The exploration missions came later and served a different purpose. Chandrayaan 1, launched in 2008, carried instruments including a NASA imaging spectrometer whose data provided key evidence for water molecules bound in lunar soil, a genuinely significant scientific result. The Mars Orbiter Mission, launched in November 2013 and inserted into Martian orbit in September 2014, made India the first country to reach Mars orbit on its first attempt, and did so with a spacecraft built at very low cost by using a smaller launcher and a long looping trajectory that traded time for fuel. Chandrayaan 2 in 2019 placed a capable orbiter around the Moon but its lander crashed. Chandrayaan 3 corrected the design and succeeded. Aditya L1, launched in September 2023, was placed near the first Lagrange point to study the Sun.

What comes next, and the honest caveats

The current agenda includes Gaganyaan, a crewed orbital mission that has been repeatedly rescheduled as uncrewed test flights and abort system trials proceed, and further lunar work in cooperation with Japan. In 2020 the government opened the sector to private participation, creating IN SPACe as a regulator and promoter and NewSpace India Limited as the commercial arm, and a cluster of Indian private launch and satellite companies has since emerged, several of which have flown suborbital or small orbital vehicles.

The low cost story deserves qualification rather than dismissal. Indian salaries are far below those in the United States and Europe, which accounts for a substantial part of the difference; ISRO missions often carry smaller and lighter instrument packages; and the organisation reuses proven components aggressively rather than developing new ones for each mission. It also accepts a different risk posture, flying missions that a more risk averse agency might delay. None of that makes the achievement less real, but comparisons of headline mission cost between agencies with different accounting conventions and different labour markets are not like for like, and careful analysts say so.

The more interesting question is strategic. India's launch market share is smaller than its technical reputation suggests, partly because the workhorse PSLV serves the small satellite market that reusable rockets from the United States now serve very cheaply. Whether ISRO's next phase succeeds will depend less on landing sites and more on whether the newly opened private sector can build a heavy lift and low cost launch capability while the agency itself concentrates on science and human spaceflight. That transition is under way and its outcome is not yet known.

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