New public-private partnership

Collaboration in space research will increase opportunities

The creation of the Indian Space Association (ISPA), an industry forum which includes private companies as well as government agency Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), will guide the government in following through on its assurances to open up aerospace and related areas. At the ISPA’S inauguration, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said draft legislation on remote sensing and space communication was already in preparation. The devil, however, is always in the details when a tightly-controlled monopoly is liberalised. But this is a positive signal. There are huge opportunities in space-related areas. A focus on exploiting these could lead to a rapid build-up of capacities currently lacking in India’s industrial base. Global communications, entertainment, weather prediction, and geolocational systems are all dependent on satellites. Putting bigger, better satellites into orbit is in itself a mega-billion opportunity. Public-private partnerships would accelerate the grasp of the necessary technical know-how for building and launching larger satellites commercially.

Figuring out applications for such satellites is an even larger opportunity, and here, no single agency, no matter how accomplished, can explore all possibilities. While Isro has made contributions to geolocation, weather management and communications, private enterprise could surely do more. Encouraging the injection of private capital and entrepreneurship is a must. To take just one example, satellitebased broadband could take the internet to remote locations, and help fulfil the promise of Digital India. The Nasa experience indicates how a collaboration between public agencies and private enterprise can lead to many positive outcomes. The US space agency does engineering design, science experiments, and “blue-sky” research, while contracting out for equipment it uses. Moreover, it freely releases and licenses the arising patents. This has led to the development of a vast range of technologies, which have found other off-the-shelf uses, and enriched America’s technical capacities in many ways. To take a few examples, improvements in propulsion systems (with the private sector now building rockets), advances in computing, innovative chip designs, solar energy systems, autonomous vehicles, water management and waste-recycling systems, robotics, were all driven by space research before finding more mundane applications.

Space exploration and the demand it creates for tough, lightweight, heat-resistant, radiation–impervious materials have also led to the creation of many materials with unusual properties, such as teflon, nanotubes, dust-resistant paints, heat-resistant composites, etc. The origins of telemedicine and remote diagnosis also lie in space research. This has led to the development of things like lightweight exercise equipment, and portable MRI scanners. Studying humans, plants and other organisms in variable gravity has given us many insights into bioscience. Since Isro is considering manned missions, these are all potential growth areas where domestic industry could make large contributions. Perhaps, the private sector could also promote space tourism, which now seems to be catching on. In addition, there are the futuristic possibilities of robotic mining on the moon and asteroids, and the establishment of colonies or long-term habitats, on the moon, or Mars. Those would require entirely new technologies and Indian start-ups may well contribute in these spheres as well. Net-net, public-private partnerships could make a big positive difference. It’s up to policymakers to sensibly formulate the necessary details and regulations to enable this to happen efficiently in practice. The lobbying skills of the ISPA may be useful in this regard.