New Delhi, India – India successfully docked one satellite with another on Thursday morning, joining a small group of elite spacefaring nations that have achieved this complex technological feat in zero gravity.
Only the United States, Russia and China have conducted space docking missions, which allow separate satellites to work as a team, coordinate their tasks and share resources that cannot be carried on a single spacecraft .
The Indian mission, called Space Docking Experiment (SpaDeX), took off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh on December 30, carrying two satellites, called Chaser and Target.
Like previous Indian space companies that have made headlines – from landing on a difficult part of the Moon to launching a mission to Mars – SpaDeX was built and catapulted into space on a budget restricted.
Space observers and astrophysicists told Al Jazeera that docking expertise was of “crucial importance” to India’s space ambitions and future missions. But why is it so serious?
What place does this give India compared to the space superpowers? And how does India manage to keep its space costs low?
What did SpaDeX do?
Chaser and Target each weigh around 220 kg (485 lb). After being launched together on December 30, the two satellites separated into space.
They flew 470 km (292 miles) above Earth, where they were carefully placed in the same orbit – but about 20 km (12 miles) apart. There, they tested various maneuvers to prepare for docking.
Then Chaser slowly nudged his partner, Target, before mating in the early hours of Thursday. The docking attempt was initially scheduled for January 7, but was delayed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) after the drift between the twin satellites was found to be greater.
Celebrations erupted at the ISRO headquarters while Prime Minister Narendra Modi also congratulated the space agency for “successful demonstration of space docking of satellites”.
Modi described the docking as “an important stepping stone for India’s ambitious space missions in the years to come.”
Why is docking important?
As the mission approached, Jitendra Singh, India’s Minister of Science and Technology, said the mission was “vital to India’s future space ambitions.” Singh was referring to a series of projects undertaken by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which include sending a man to the Moon by 2040, building India’s first space station and sending of an orbiter towards Venus.
Docking technology will be critical to space station assembly and crewed missions, providing crucial facilities including on-orbit refueling and heavy infrastructure assembly in microgravity.
“ISRO has demonstrated its ability to launch and orbit objects, as well as land,” said astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury, vice-chancellor of Ashoka University in the suburbs of New York. Delhi. “Now docking is an important part of future missions – and ISRO is now reaching a very, very important level.”
In August 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission became the world’s first to land near the Moon’s South Pole. Since then, ISRO’s ambitions have only grown. The next phase of the lunar mission – Chandrayaan-4 – will involve a capsule that will collect samples from the moon and then dock with a returning spacecraft for the journey back to Earth.
“Mission like Chandrayaan-4 is so complicated that it cannot be launched in one piece. It’s too heavy and the pieces have to combine in space before landing on the moon to collect the moon rocks,” Raychaudhury explained.
Demonstrating its hosting capabilities has also enabled ISRO to offer services to others, Raychaudhury added.
Pallava Bagla, co-author of Reaching for the Stars: India’s Journey to Mars and Beyond, agreed that “ISRO needs to master this technology for future missions.”
A unique addition to the SpaDeX mission is the incorporation of two dozen experiments carried out by non-governmental entities, including space technology startups and academic institutions.
“By making this platform accessible [to the private sector]we are lowering barriers to entry and enabling a wider range of entities to contribute to the space sector,” said Pawan Goenka, chairman of India’s space regulator, the Indian National Promotion and Authorization Center space.
Bagla agreed.
“It is no longer a space organization of the Indian government,” he said of ISRO. “It is now an Indian space ecosystem in which ISRO is the main player which now holds hands with start-ups and private institutions.”
“Innovation, not frugality”
As ISRO continues to reach for the stars, a report by Tracxn, a market intelligence platform, notes that funding for India’s private space sector has fallen 55% in 2024, from $130.2 million to $59.1 million in 2023, a first decline in the last five years. . (Reuters reported that this drop occurs in a context of a global drop of 20% in investments in the space sector.)
Meanwhile, government funding for India’s space agency has soared. After the historic landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the Moon and following the launch of a solar probe, Aditya-L1, the Indian government has allocated the largest fund ever allocated by the country for future space projects – a kitty of 10 billion rupees ($116 million). ) – announced in October last year.
However, experts told Al Jazeera that these funds remain minimal given the complexity and ambitions of the upcoming projects.
The country’s space agency has already spent $74 million to send the Mars orbiter and $75 million for Chandrayaan-3 last year. For comparison, NASA’s Mars orbiter cost $582 million in 2013, while the Russian lunar mission that crashed two days before Chandrayaan-3 landed cost $133 million. Or take a look at the budget of famous space thrillers like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar ($165 million) and Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity ($100 million).
But is this a feature or a bug of the Indian space program?
Mylswamy Annadurai, who worked for 36 years at ISRO and was director of its satellite center, recalled famous photographs of Indian scientists carrying rocket parts on a bicycle in 1963, before the world’s first rocket launch. country.
“Having achieved its vision regarding education, healthcare, weather forecasting and natural disaster monitoring, ISRO realized that it was time to move forward towards the dreams that no one had. even dared to see,” Annadurai told Al Jazeera, recalling a conversation with APJ Abdul Kalam. , famous aerospace scientist and former President of India. “The next generation, we thought, ‘Why can’t we go beyond that?’ »
Annadurai went on to lead India’s first deep space mission, Chandrayaan-1, which led to the crucial discovery of lunar water on the Moon – and earned him the title of India’s ‘Moonman’. He was also responsible for preparing project reports, including government budget requests.
“I knew very, very clearly that you cannot ask for a budget [that is] beyond the reach of the Indian government. I had to justify the cost to policymakers,” he said, explaining why it spends a fraction of what other space nations invest in their missions.
“I know my father’s ability to finance my higher education,” Annadurai added with a laugh. “We also forced ourselves to ensure that the mission [Chandrayaan-1] possible in this budget [3.8 billion rupees ($44m)] – and this question of “how” opened the way to ingenious solutions.
Here’s how.
“We made and flew only one hardware module, unlike four or five testers from other agencies,” Annadurai said, listing the ways Indian space scientists have cut costs. “Use modest launch vehicles, ingenious designs, plot longer and slower paths and use less fuel.”
Then he joked.
“We are second to none in terms of space programs, but we are superior to everyone else when it comes to salaries,” Annadurai said, laughing again, “and that is a reasonably good reason for the low costs.”
For Ashoka University’s Raychaudhury, ‘jugaad’ (an informal Hindi term for an approach to solving a problem using simple resources) is “one of the distinctive features of ISRO missions”.
Yet he believes the emphasis on low-budget ISRO successes is also a legacy of historical criticism and Western media mockery of India’s space efforts. In 2014, after India launched the robotic probe to Mars, the New York Times published an infamous cartoon depicting a farmer with a cow knocking on the door of a room marked “Elite Space Club”, where are seated well-equipped men. The drawing was described as “racist” and the newspaper apologized after the controversy.
“We keep trying to justify that we’re doing it at low cost. ISRO has innovative approaches and ensures that resources are used very economically,” Raychaudhury said.
But ISRO should also be lauded for its innovations, he added.
“This fixation on the budget is now becoming an obstacle,” Raychaudhury said.
“Innovation should be ISRO’s identity, not frugality.”
