MUMBAI -
With the space industry emerging as the next
economic frontier to be explored, India's
scientists aim to propel the South Asian country
into stratospheric heights of profitability in a
market dominated by the US, Russia, Europe and
China. The key to success, they believe, is
cutting costs.
More than 60% of global
satellite revenues now come from consumer-based
video, radio and Internet services, and the
24-year-old satellite business journal SatNew says
about 104
satellites launches are
planned between now and 2008.
Antrix Corp,
the marketing arm of Indian Space Research
Organization (ISRO) satellite data products, has
cornered 20% of the global satellite imaging
business, ISRO sources told Asia Times Online.
Antrix has an annual sales turnover of
US$68 million, mostly marketing transponder
capacity for satellite TV, Internet and
telecommunications. Antrix sells transponder
capacity (transponders receive signals, translate,
amplify their frequency and transmit them back to
Earth) for $1 million per client a year.
The ISRO now plans to cut the cost of
launch vehicles, including working to use purified
kerosene as rocket fuel just as Russia and the US
have been doing. Rockets swallow many tonnes of
rocket fuel, which currently costs India $46 per
kilogram. With purified kerosene, costs plummet to
less than 50 cents per kilogram.
Much of
India's ability to cut technology costs arose from
the necessity of having to find home-grown
solutions when the United States and European
countries imposed sanctions after India first
detonated a nuclear device in 1974. The ISRO had
to reinvent technologies it could no longer buy
and, ironically, those technologies are now giving
European and US agencies a run for their money.
S Krishnamurthy, a director at the ISRO
headquarters in Bangalore, said the focus on
self-reliance and the low cost of highly talented
workers give India an edge over other countries.
India's steadily growing space business
also received a major boost this January after its
first Space Capsule Recovery Experiment (SRE-1)
was launched and retrieved intact.
Krishnamurthy confirmed that the
successful SRE-1 test indicated that the ISRO has
more commercial aims. "The Indian launch vehicle
will be about 30% cheaper for similar launch
capabilities" in other countries, he said.
India still has some catching up to do
with China, which in the past five years has
launched 24 Changzheng rockets, orbited 22
satellites of different types and versions, and
has planned many moon missions. Luan Enjie, one of
the directors of the Chinese lunar program, told
the media this month that by 2015, China will have
a launching fleet of 1,060 units, enabling it to
corner most of the launch-services market.
The success of the SRE-1 was also a big
milestone for India's manned-space-flight program,
as it demonstrated its reusable capabilities in
space, putting it in the same league as the
European Union, the US, Russia, China and Japan.
"The SRE-1 can now offer a platform for
experiments under microgravity conditions of
space," said ISRO chairman Madhavan Nair.
Krishnamurthy also said that India is
planning to develop a reusable launch vehicle
(RLV) to "reduce the cost of access to space by an
order of magnitude, so that it can be competitive
in the world space market. Current costs range
between $12,000 and $15,000 to place a kilogram of
payload in orbit."
According to Nair, the
Madras School of Economics has estimated that ISRO
projects have contributed nearly three times the
astonishingly modest ISRO annual budget of $800
million to the nation's gross domestic product.
The downside is that the Indian
government's appreciation of the country's
talented space scientists is not reflected in
their paychecks. An entry-level teenager in
India's business process outsourcing (BPO)
industry earns about $8,400 a year, while an
Indian space scientist earns half that figure plus
a modest pension.
The ISRO is the
brainchild of Dr Vikram Sarabhai (1919-71), a
remarkably farsighted man considered to be the
father of India's space program. He said: "We are
convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role
nationally, and in the community of nations, we
must be second to none in the application of
advanced technologies to the real problems of man
and society."
ISRO chairman Madhavan Nair
said: "India is perhaps the only country where
societal needs are met by the space program in a
cost-effective manner and the services are
reaching the needy."
India's six
remote-sensing satellites form the largest such
constellation in the world and oversee land and
coastal waters and help scientists inform farmers
about climatic changes. India's seven
communication satellites, the largest civilian
system in the Asia-Pacific region, give television
coverage to 90% of the population, including the
remotest regions, and also serve to provide remote
health care services and education to the rural
poor.
In 2005, A P J Abdul Kalam, India's
president and the world's first rocket scientist
to be head of state, outlined an eight-point
agenda to guide India's space missions for the
next 25 years.
At a ceremony at the Vikram
Sarabhai Space Center to celebrate the 25th
anniversary of the first flight of the country's
launch vehicle, SLV-3, he urged India's space
scientists to make sure that the country is part
of the "space industrial revolution", including
launching manned missions to the moon and Mars,
setting up an industrial base in space, developing
a solar sail for interplanetary missions,
developing cost-effective space transportation
systems using hypersonic reusable vehicles, using
space energy for power, and using space technology
for integrated disaster management.
The
next big ISRO challenge is its moon missions. Last
year, 80 leading Indian scientists met in
Bangalore and expressed their support for the ISRO
undertaking a manned moon flight by 2014,
developing a fully autonomous orbital vehicle to
carry two-member crew to low Earth orbit and
safely return them to Earth.
ISRO's first
moon craft, Chandrayaan-1, is being built for
launch next year. Chandrayaan-1 ("Moon Vehicle" in
Hindi) costs the ISRO just 2% of its annual budget
for a period of five years for this mission. The
ISRO says the moon probe will map the lunar
surface at resolutions down to 5 meters, for the
first time in human history.
According to
Nair, one of the purposes of the moon mission is
to inspire Indian youngsters to take up a career
in science, which they will be more inclined to do
if the government makes it financially desirable.
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