Isro challenges Musk, Bezos with record launch

India’s space agency 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 spaceflight companies run by billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Satellites from the United States, India, Canada and Germany will enter orbit after a scheduled June 20 liftoff from the Sriharikota barrier island along the southeast coast, the agency's chair man, AS Kiran Kumar, said in an 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 satellitesintospaceissurging as phone companies, Inter net providers, airlines and even carmakers 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 spaceshuttle 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. “So you have to take care of these threats.”

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. Bloomberg Mumbai, June 15: India’s ambitious plan to be a major player in semiconductors, taking on the Chinese and churning out locally-made chips for a new generation of smartphone users, has proved to be a little too ambitious.

The government boldly announced three years ago it would host two new $5 billion chip plants as part of a project to become a global manufacturing powerhouse, creating thousands of jobs, reducing its need for imports and taking on global rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and GlobalFoundries.

But potential investors have not materialized, put off by India’s wobbly infrastructure, unstable power supply, bureaucratic red tape and poor planning, according to analysts and industry insiders.

Just weeks after Jaypee Infratech, which was partnering IBM and Israel’s Tower Jazz, abandoned plans for one of the big chip plants, STMicroelectronics is set to scrap plans to build the other $5 billion plant as its main local partner failed to raise enough money from skeptical investors, government officials said.

“We’ve had a lot of issues with the original (semiconductor) plan,” a top official at India's Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) told Reuters.

“The technology curve has moved ahead in the last three years, the global environment has changed and China has emerged as a big player.”

Two other officials at the department said a consortium led by Indian start-up Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (HSMC) with STMicro and Malaysia’s Silterra had not been able to raise the required funding for the plant, and it might be scrapped. Reuters