India's Future Plans : Exploring Space

The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in this cradle forever.

Space is the final frontier and future economies need to conquer this frontier to survive. India is a young country with tremendous capabilities to become a global powerhouse, and sure enough the country is taking adequate measures to tap those potential to fulfil India's future endeavours.

Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is a major player in the space sector, making strides in the field of technology. ISRO recently announced the development of IN-SPACe programme to allow private players to be a part of the country's future endeavours.

Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre (IN-SPACe) will access demands of private players, including educational and research institutions and explore ways to accommodate these requirements in consultation with ISRO. With the offset of new algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IOT), and other technologies, it had become increasingly difficult for the organization to keep up with the projects. Since ISRO was the only body responsible for the all-round development of next-gen delivery system, communication and military satellite, foreign orders, tracker system, navigation system, research developments and many more, it was important to release the burden off them to allow ISRO to focus on development of research related operations and allow private players to take up the less important aspects of the industry such as launching, maintaining, mass production works and less research intensive development.

According to the new IN-SPACe programme, existing ISRO infrastructure, both ground and space based scientific and technical resources and even data can be made accessible to interested parties to enable them carry out their space related work. IN-SPACe will be the facilitator and regulator and act as an efficient bridge between both the parties.

Development of another arm under the organization was announced in 2019 that would be responsible for supply and demand of space application systems. New Space India Limited (NSIL) is responsible to look for customers for ISRO's products and also interact with them on behalf of the organization for development of technologies required by them. ANTRIX is another arm of the organization similar to NSIL but deals with international clients. These expansionary policies of the government have strengthened the capabilities of ISRO which has allowed it to come up with ambitious plans to push India's space boundaries to next level.

Announcement of India's own space station was a big buzz across the country and world which shows the effectiveness of those policies. The Space Station is going to be a 20 tons modular model with facilities to hold multiple astronauts for 15-20 days at a time.

India is not restricted to collaborate with anyone in space sector and definitely could have easily joined the next-gen International Space Station programme but ISRO choose a more dangerous but reliant and self-motivating path to build its own station which will allow the country to have full autonomy over the scientific research done in space.

ISRO has already started to work on developing the technologies for the same. With the announcement of Gaganyaan mission, India will have the technology to launch humans in space and perform complex manoeuvres of docking and re-entry. The organization is all set to test its abort systems and is currently developing the life support systems. And the best part of this mega project is that Indian start-ups and companies are actively involved in helping ISRO.

Announcement of IN-SPACe was a historic moment partially because it opened a new sector for private players to explore but mainly because under this programme, the Indian government will be able to inspire young minds to get involved in research. This is also an opportunity to allow private players to understand the changing technology and be future ready to support the backbone of Indian economy.

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The views expressed above are personal and belong to the author.

This post has been written by Rishav Kumar.

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