Isro challenges Elon Musk with record satellite launch

The launch of 22 satellites next week is the biggest single launch by India 

India’s space agency, Isro, will launch a record 22 satellites on a single rocket as it tries to ease a global backlog and demonstrate the ability to compete with commercial space flight companies run by billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Satellites from the US, India, Canada and Germany will enter orbit after a scheduled 20 June lift-off from the Sriharikota barrier island along the south-east coast, the agency’s chairman, A.S. Kiran Kumar, said in a 9 June interview in Bengaluru. Most of the machines will observe and measure the Earth’s atmosphere, with another from an Indian university helping provide service for amateur radio operators.
The business of putting satellites into space is surging as phone companies, Internet providers, airlines and even car makers seek bandwidth for communications. The resulting backlog is creating opportunities for Musk and Bezos, who are privatizing what was once a government-only industry by testing reusable rockets to help reduce costs. To keep pace, India is touting its traditionally low-cost programme along with achievements such as putting an orbiter around Mars and building a space-shuttle prototype.
“Unless you keep yourself abreast and look to the future on how to make things better, how to make it more cost-effective, you run the risk of becoming irrelevant,” said Kumar, 64, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro). “So you have to take care of these threats.”
Weather, smartphones
The 22 machines being launched next week include an Earth observation satellite to capture light invisible to the naked eye. It is the biggest single launch by India, trailing Russia’s 33 in 2014 and NASA’s 29 the year before.
There were 208 satellites launched in 2014, almost double the amount the year before, as countries such as India and Indonesia try to bring phone services to most of their people for the first time. India is the world’s second-largest smartphone market after China, and that demand is helping fuel what may be a 30% increase in lift-offs globally during the next five years.
India has about 35 satellites in orbit for broadcasting, navigation, scientific exploration and weather monitoring, yet it needs double that amount, Kumar said.
“We need to make more launches and we have to build more satellites,” he said in an office dotted with scale models of Indian rockets and satellites. “So we are trying to make that happen. We’re reaching a stage where every month we are having a launch.”
Orbiting Mars
India last month successfully launched a scale model of a reusable spacecraft, a project that in time could pit the nation against Bezos and Musk in the race to make access to space cheaper and easier. The country also injected a probe into Mars’ atmosphere in 2014 for just $74 million, about 11% of the cost of the US’s Maven probe.
To meet the increasing competition from private industry and other nations, India needs to expand its space programme, said Ajey Lele, a New Delhi-based senior fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.
“Right now, India has got only one launch site,” Lele said. “So, it needs to develop another site within India or maybe somewhere else.”
Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., after three successful landings of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket since April, plans to start reusing rockets as soon as September, the billionaire said. Blue Origin Llc has shot off and landed the same rocket three times, and Bezos said low-cost launches are the missing pieces for space travel.
India takes that as a challenge, said Kumar, who joined Isro in 1975 and has since helped design satellites and worked on the Mars mission. India is also collaborating with NASA for the 2020 launch of a radar system to detect small changes in the Earth’s surface, potentially benefiting climate-change studies and helping farmers with crop rotation and flood monitoring, Kumar said.
“If you don’t have a capability, you have to build that capability,” he said. “It is not trying to emulate, but you also have to be relevant.”