SCIENCE-INDIA: Moon Mission on a Budget

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Dev Raj

NEW DELHI, Mar 9 2000 (IPS) - India’s space establishment has announced plans for a budget moon mission and is confident of earning the trip through commercial satellite launches and the sale of spatial services.

India already has the hardware in the shape of its tried and tested polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV) system and has begun creating and integrating the software for it, said a spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

According to Prof. U.R. Rao, top space scientist and member of India’s Space Commission, India has the technology to land a man on the moon but would settle for a modest ‘fly-by’ mission costing no more than 50 million dollars.

India and China are the only developing countries that build, launch, and operate remote sensing satellites.

India’s lunar mission planned for 2008, is planned to be a demonstrator and according to ISRO chairman “bring in a new dimension to India’s international cooperation in space.”

Kasturirangan has been aggressively pursuing the idea of commercial launches and sale of space services, products and consultancy through the government-owned Antrix Corporation Limited, a commercial front for ISRO.

Last year, Antrix launched a South Korean satellite KITSAT-3 weighing 100 kgs and the 50 kg German TUBSAT satellite on a PSLV, serving notice that the company was seriously in the space taxi business.

Proposals and orders have since been pouring in from a number of countries for similar rides on board the PSLV, and Antrix already has in hand a contract to launch the 100-kg Belgian satellite ‘PROBA’.

But most promising has been the signing of a strategic tie-up with the French space giant Arianespace, which presently dominates the 20-billion dollar-a-year satellite launch business.

Ariane expects to broaden its range of customers through the deal while Antrix would gain from the marketing expertise of its bigger partner, Arianespace Director for Marketing and Sales, Didier Aubin said on a visit here last month.

Aubin said Arianespace looked forward to ISRO’s development of a geostationary space launch vehicle (GSLV) using advanced cryogenic engines which would complement launches from its facility at Kourou in French Guyana.

For now ISRO hopes to tap the growing market for launching smaller communications and broadcast satellites in the 100-300 kg range which the PSLV launchers with their 1,200 kg capacity are eminently suited to.

Potential clients could come from the reviving East and South-east Asian economies and even the European Union (EU) which is currently in the market for a global positioning satellite (GPS) network but is anxious to pare down costs.

Right now, the Ariane-Antrix partnership is occupied with the scheduled mid-March launch of India’s latest communication satellite the INSAT 3-B which will cater mostly to business development and mobile communications.

The 2,070 kg satellite has already been ferried to Ariane’s launch facility at Kouro in French Guyana and the actual launch on a heavy-lift Ariane-5 launcher could take place any day between Mar. 14 and Mar. 21.

Once placed in geostationary transfer orbit by the Ariane rocket, ISRO’s Master Control Facility (MCF) at Hassan in southern Karnataka state will take over and move it to its final location using on-board booster motors.

Even more than the launching and operating of communications satellites, ISRO hopes to make money in the global remote sensing data market which is expected to be worth 12 billion dollars by the year 2005.

India already has an impressive remote sensing programme based on four satellites in its IRS series and was doing good business selling raw data through Space Imaging, a U.S company, but Kasturirangan said the future lay in value addition.

“The market requirement for value-added information will far outgrow the demand for satellite images and there is a great opportunity here for commercial ventures in the spatial information industry,” Kasturirangan said.

Projections by Merryl Lynch say the commercial satellite data market covering land use mapping, military and intelligence, agriculture, forestry, fishing, crisis management, consumer,

education, media and entertainment applications would grow to 6.5 billion dollars by 2007.

Established U.N principles on remote sensing demand that satellite data concerning territory under a country’s jurisdiction be made available to that country on a “non- discriminatory basis and on reasonable cost terms.”

According to Wu Guoxiang, Chinese representative at ESCAP in Bangkok, China and India face similar problems in the operationalisation of their satellite systems because of “inefficient involvement of the private sector.”

“Without commercialisation, development programmes must depend on the government,” Wu said adding that China’s ambitious manned space flight programme became possible only because of its “open-door” economic policy.

Wu said India’s strength over China lay in its language capability. “India is more active than China in international cooperation, which gives India more opportunity to share experiences with advanced countries.”