Escape velocity: On what India’s space sector must focus on

For much of the 20th century, a rocket tearing a white seam through the sky did for India roughly what football did for Argentina and Brazil. Nations shut out of the councils where economic and strategic weight was measured found, in a game of European origin, an arena where their poverty did not disqualify them. Mastery was open to anyone with nerve and skill. Space was other things but also India’s football. A famished, newly independent republic that could barely feed itself nevertheless chose to gamble on rockets and atomic piles — an expensive bet on a future it could not yet see. In that era of a controlled economy and state broadcaster monopoly, a launcher rising was its own justification. The utility of its payload was secondary, in the eyes of the masses, to the veneer of technological competency. Today, rockets and satellites are no longer emblems; they are the plumbing of the information age, the unglamorous scaffolding beneath navigation, banking, weather and war. On the third National Space Day — the anniversary of Chandrayaan-3’s touchdown in the lunar south polar region — Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged 20 space-startup founders to build an “aura” that would draw the world’s talent to India. But that might be a wrong framing married to the old view of space. A private space sector cannot harvest success merely because its wares are called rockets and launch vehicles; the romance that carried the state programme will not carry a business.

A recent peer-reviewed analysis in Economics Letters by Alessio Terzi and Francesco Nicoli finds that it cost $13,302 to loft a kilogram into low-earth orbit on an Indian rocket in 2025 — costlier than China ($5,809), Japan, Russia, Europe and the United States ($3,225), and well above the global average of $3,868. That is because India launches too rarely and uneconomically to rapidly build the required reputation for reliability. There were only five launches in 2025, against the 30 that were projected. The consequence is visible. GSAT-N2, at 4,700 kg too heavy for ISRO’s LVM-3, went up on a Falcon 9; Pixxel and Digantara — two of the 20 at Mr. Modi’s meeting — rode SpaceX to orbit. SpaceX alone put three-quarters of the world’s payload into orbit in 2025, underlining its near monopolistic stranglehold but also pointing to opportunities. The value of India’s space sector can no longer rely on aura but in jobs, in long-term capital and the tax revenues that follow and, in heavy-lift launches that undercut SpaceX and China. Moon bases with NASA and interplanetary reveries belong to the new imagination of space, and they matter — but they are the ornament, not the engine.