Indian Space Programme Goes Commercial

(AFP)
22 April 2007
KhaleejTimes

BANGALORE - India will launch an Italian satellite via a home-built rocket this week, seeking entry into an exclusive club of nations that have put their space programmes to commercial use.
The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) will on Monday carry the Agile astronomical satellite from the Sriharikota spaceport, 80 kilometres (50 miles) north of Chennai in south India, space agency officials said here.

India wants to join and compete with the United States, Russia, China, the Ukraine and the European Space Agency in offering commercial satellite launch services, a market worth up to 2.5 billion dollars a year.

Monday’s launch of the 352-kilogram (774-pound) Agile satellite will be a key test of the country’s commercial launch capabilities.

...India started its space programme in 1963, and has since developed and put its own satellites into space. It has also designed and built launch rockets to reduce its dependence on overseas space agencies.

It carried out the first successful launch of a domestic satellite, which weighed 35 kg, by a home-built rocket in 1980.

...Satellites were designed to map natural resources and predict the weather to help farmers and the teeming masses of rural poor.

...The vast majority of India’s 650,000 villages, home to two-thirds of the country’s 1.1 billion people, are still not a part of the communications network, and natural disasters such as drought and cyclones continue to take a heavy toll of life and property.

Murthi said India could not afford to make commerce the primary objective of its space programme until the country’s development goals were met, and could only offer “separable capacity” to potential customers.

...Antrix also plans to offer overseas customers a package deal under which local engineers would design and fabricate satellites for launch by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which runs India’s space programme.

“We call that on-orbit delivery,” said Murthi, who was previously at Bangalore-based ISRO, where he took part in satellite programme planning and technology transfers to companies.

For Monday’s launch of the Italian satellite, ISRO is charging 11 million dollars, the Press Trust of India has reported. Space agency officials have confirmed the fee is close to that figure.

The PSLV that will carry the Italian payload into space has carried out nine successful launches since 1994 -- including eight remote-sensing and one amateur radio satellite—and is known as the workhorse of the Indian space programme.

Capable of placing 1,500-kg satellites into orbit, the rocket has been modified to launch the much smaller Agile, together with which it will carry a space module to test avionic systems like mission computers and navigation systems...