The Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Union Budget 2021-22 on February 1, 2021. In her speech she mentioned three important space related items:
“the year for our Chandrayaan-3 mission” (point 19)
NSIL will execute the launch for Brazil’s Amazonia satellite and some few Indian satellites. (point 129)
Four astronauts undergoing training in Russia. First uncrewed (the budget calls it unmanned) flight in December, 2021. (point 130)
The outcome budget has some interesting insights. The outcome budget has two components:
Space Technology
Space Applications
Under Space Technology, the outcome budget calls for 1 Gaganyaan uncrewed flight, 2 PSLV launches (launching 4 satellites), 1 GSLV-Mk II launches (launching 1 satellite) and 2 SSLV launches (launching 2 satellites). This totals 6 launches for 2021-22. ISRO has been trying to break the charmed 10 launch per year mark since 2000 at least.
ISRO is claiming a 36% readiness for launching India’s human spaceflight program. By the end of this financial year (March 2022), they expect to launch a “Test Vehicle” for this purpose. The r/ISRO sub-Reddit thinks that this could be the Test Vehicle mentioned in the ISRO Annual Report 2019-20. ISRO has already mentioned that COVID-19 would delay the launch of crewed Gaganyaan flights beyond 2022.
ISRO hopes to launch 2 Earth Observation and 1 Navigation satellite.
DoS (through NSIL) has declared an income of INR 129.35 crores by providing launch services and has declared an import dependency of 22% for the financial year.
Under space applications, Department of Space (through NSIL) claims an income of INR 11 crores by the sale of remote sensing data.
In total, the budget allocated to Department of Space for 2021-22 is INR 13,949.09 crores. This is an increase of 3% from the budget promised last year. Of the INR 13,479.09 crores promised last year, DoS received only INR 9,500 crores as a result of COVID-19.
The Economic Survey released before the Budget said that India’s space expenditure in 2019 was $1.8 billion. This is low compared to United States’ budget of $19.5 billion and China’s budget of $11 billion. It said there were 40 space start-ups in India. It also said that the setting up of public sector undertaking, NSIL and the regulatory body, INSPACe will help in the building the space ecosystem in India. (Times of India, Chethan Kumar)
The Annexure III of the budget speech that deals with India’s disinvestment policy, space is classified as a strategic sector. Sitharaman says that in strategic sector, there will be a bare minimum presence of public sector enterprises.
YouTuber Gareeb Scientist made a nice summary video of the budget in Hindi (available with English sub-titles).
Other Links
ISRO signs a Non-Disclosure Agreement with Skyroot Aerospace. Skyroot Aerospace is a small satellite launch vehicle provider based in Hyderabad. ISRO had last signed a NDA with AgniKul Cosmos, also a launch vehicle provider in December, 2020.
SatSure launches SatSure Sparta, an open data offering from the company.
SatSure and Bellatrix Aerospace sign MoU for providing satellites for a Low Earth orbit satellite constellation. Bellatrix will provide SatSure with a satellite bus and hybrid propulsion technology.
NewSpace India podcast episode with Gareeb Scientist, India’s biggest space science and technology YouTuber. Most of his videos are in a combination of English and Hindi. He has sub-titles. But, this interview is in English.
Reading fog data from INSAT-3DR - Vasudevan Mukunth interprets fog data from INSAT-3DR. ISRO images shared anywhere has no explanation for what their data stands for. VM tries to provide an explanation.
Chinese iSpace suffers failure with second orbital launch attempt. Andrew Jones has started his own newsletter. In the first issue, he covers January 2021 from the perspective of the Chinese space program. If you like to follow updates, I would suggest this is one of the best ways of doing so.
Iran completes test launch of Zuljanah launch vehicle. Zuljanah is the name of the horse of Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad.
UAE launches ‘space court’ to support thriving global sector.