ISRO as an Institution: Building Space Capability

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The Indian space programme began in a fishing village. In 1962 the Indian National Committee for Space Research was set up under the Department of Atomic Energy, and it chose Thumba, near Thiruvananthapuram on the Kerala coast, as a sounding rocket range because it sits almost exactly on the geomagnetic equator. The local Catholic church, St Mary Magdalene, was handed over and became the first workshop, with the bishop's house serving as an office; rocket components were reportedly moved to the pad on bicycles and bullock carts. The first sounding rocket, an American built Nike Apache, was launched from Thumba on the twenty first of November 1963. That combination of extreme thrift and serious scientific intent has been the organisation's signature ever since.

The Indian Space Research Organisation was formed on the fifteenth of August 1969, and in 1972 the government created a Department of Space to house it, reporting directly to the Prime Minister rather than to a line ministry. This is an important structural fact: like atomic energy, space was treated as a strategic national capability whose budget and priorities would be set at the centre, which gave it unusual continuity across changes of government.

The founding argument was set by Vikram Sarabhai, the physicist and industrialist who led the early programme. He argued explicitly that India was not competing in a race to the Moon or to manned spaceflight, and that the justification for a poor country running a space programme was the application of satellite technology to real problems: communications for a country with poor terrestrial networks, television for education, weather forecasting for a monsoon dependent agriculture, and remote sensing for water, forests and crops. That framing answered the objection, which is still raised, that a country with widespread poverty should not be launching rockets. Whether it fully answers it is a matter on which reasonable people differ, though the sums involved are small relative to Indian public spending, and the applications are demonstrably in use.

Learning to launch

The first Indian satellite, Aryabhata, was launched on the nineteenth of April 1975 by a Soviet rocket from a site in the Soviet Union. Indigenous launch capability came five years later, when the four stage solid fuelled SLV-3 placed the small Rohini satellite into orbit on the eighteenth of July 1980, making India the sixth country able to launch a satellite on its own vehicle. The project director on that vehicle, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, later became President of India, which did the programme's public profile no harm at all.

The next vehicle, the Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle, failed repeatedly through the 1980s. The workhorse that followed did not. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle succeeded for the first time in October 1994 and has since flown many dozens of times with a very high success rate, placing Indian remote sensing satellites into sun synchronous polar orbits and carrying large numbers of foreign payloads commercially. In February 2017 a single PSLV flight deployed one hundred and four satellites, then a record.

Heavier launches were harder, and the difficulty was political as much as technical. Placing satellites into geostationary transfer orbit requires a cryogenic upper stage burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, and in the early 1990s India contracted with a Russian agency for engines and technology transfer. The United States objected under missile technology control arrangements and applied sanctions; the transfer of technology was cancelled, though some engines were supplied. India then spent roughly two decades developing its own cryogenic stage, which flew successfully in January 2014. The heavier LVM3, previously called GSLV Mark III, made its first orbital flight in 2017 and now carries the programme's most demanding missions.

Applications, science and the opening to private firms

The applications side arrived early and mattered more than the launches. Between 1975 and 1976 the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, run jointly with the United States space agency using a borrowed satellite, broadcast educational programming directly to community receivers in several thousand villages across six states, and remains a landmark study in development communication. The INSAT series of communication and meteorological satellites began operating in the 1980s and underpinned Indian television, telephony, cyclone warning and disaster management. The Indian Remote Sensing programme, beginning in 1988, built one of the larger civilian earth observation constellations, used for crop forecasting, groundwater mapping, forest cover assessment and urban planning. A regional navigation system, NavIC, provides positioning over India and its surroundings.

Deep space missions came later and gave the organisation its international reputation. Chandrayaan-1, launched in October 2008, carried instruments from several countries and produced the observations that confirmed the presence of water molecules on the lunar surface. The Mars Orbiter Mission, launched on the fifth of November 2013, entered Mars orbit on the twenty fourth of September 2014, making India the first Asian country to reach Mars and the first country anywhere to succeed on its first attempt, at a cost widely reported as a small fraction of comparable Western missions. Chandrayaan-2 in 2019 placed a successful orbiter but lost its lander during descent. Chandrayaan-3 corrected the fault and made a soft landing on the twenty third of August 2023 at a high southern latitude, the first landing in that region of the Moon by any country. Aditya-L1, launched in September 2023, observes the Sun from a point about one and a half million kilometres from Earth. A human spaceflight programme, Gaganyaan, is under development.

The organisation runs through specialised centres: launch vehicles at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, launches from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, satellites at the U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, applications at the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, propulsion at the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre, and tracking through a network with a master control facility at Hassan.

The most significant recent change is institutional rather than technical. Commercial activity was long handled by Antrix Corporation, formed in 1992; a second company, NewSpace India Limited, was created in 2019. In 2020 the government established a regulator and promoter called IN-SPACe to authorise private space activity, and an Indian Space Policy issued in 2023 set out a division in which private firms build and operate systems while the state agency concentrates on research and advanced technology. Indian private launch companies have since flown their own rockets. Not everyone in the sector is convinced the transition is being managed quickly enough, and the agency's dominance of talent and facilities remains a practical constraint. But the direction, from a state monopoly built in a converted church to a regulated commercial sector, is clear.

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