Space policy, private sector and governance

Prelims and Mains

The policy settled the division of labour in 2023, so the argument since has been about pace rather than direction. It also set the terms of the opening: what data is free, how much foreign money may come in, and what ISRO stops making.

• The frontier missions ISRO keeps for itself include Gaganyaan, Chandrayaan-4, the Bharatiya Antariksh Station by 2035 and a crewed Moon landing by 2040.
• Earth observation data coarser than 5 m is made available free, while finer data is not.
• Foreign direct investment is allowed to 74 per cent by the automatic route for satellites, 49 per cent for launch vehicles and spaceports, and 100 per cent for components.
• About 450 space startups are registered, against a handful in 2020.
• India's space economy is about $8.4 billion, under 2 per cent of the world's, against a target of $44 billion by 2033.

Background reading: The Indian Express, 7 Sep 2026: Private sector push is 'ecosystem expansion, not privatisation': ISRO allays staff concerns (opens in a new tab)

Prelims and Mains

Every private space activity in India ends at the same desk, and IN-SPACe both authorises it and promotes it. The second job is the one that matters to a startup, because it opens government test and launch facilities to firms that could never build their own.

• It has issued 113 authorisations to 52 non-governmental entities.
• It has invited private operators to run the small satellite launch complex at Kulasekarapattinam, Tamil Nadu.
• A private operator at a launch complex raises questions of safety, liability and accountability to Parliament.

Prelims and Mains

An orbit is not a parking space: the atmosphere reaches faintly into the lowest of them and drags whatever is there slowly down. How long that takes, and what survives the fall, is what the re-entry rules are written around.

• Atmospheric drag pulls a low orbit down on its own, so an object in low earth orbit comes back in years or decades whether anyone means it to or not.
• Higher orbits have too little air for drag to do that work, so an object left there stays.
• Re-entry does not destroy everything: light structure burns up, while dense parts such as tanks and engine components can survive to the ground.
• That is why a planned re-entry is aimed at open ocean, and why where a dead object comes down is no longer its owner's business alone.

Prelims and Mains

IN-SPACe issued India's first guidelines on planned re-entry on the third National Space Day. They settle a question of jurisdiction as much as one of safety, since a falling object does not consult the map beneath it.

• Any Indian entity carrying out a planned re-entry, anywhere, needs IN-SPACe authorisation.
• A foreign entity re-entering over Indian territory must work through an Indian incorporated entity answerable to Indian law.
• They draw on the United Nations Guidelines for the Long-term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities.