Dr. K Sivan, Chairman, Space Commission and Secretary, Department of Space wrote a New Year message on January 3, 2022. These New Year messages seem to be the most important center-piece of communications from the Indian Space Program these days.
I wrote here about his message from New Year 2021. I expanded on the same on my blog.
The main idea behind the space reforms was to get the operational parts of the space sector to NewSpace India Ltd (NSIL) and the private sector. However, these have not been fully implemented. As we transition, the load on ISRO only goes up supporting the transition while also carrying it’s full workload.
Therefore, Sivan has to defend the lack of launches in 2021. He rightly points to progress in work in-house on various projects. Many of these are also operational projects - remote sensing, communications and navigations satellites. There are a few projects related to interplanetary missions and missions involving international collaboration.
NSIL is still picking up the slack. Sivan mentions in his letter that the company is profitable and the success with getting the GSAT-24 satellite bid. We are still waiting for NSIL to pick the consortium that would work on the PSLV commercialization. We are still waiting for details of the GSLV commercialization efforts. The latter may be stalled because of the GSLV failure in 2021. This, in turn, pushes the load back on ISRO.
Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) is also falling in place with the Chairman being picked in 2021. There were news reports that three of the ten drafts are headed to the Union Cabinet. There needs to be more push to work on this and complete all ten drafts.
As I had said last year, the decadal programs of ISRO must be published. This has not happened since it’s announcement in Sivan’s New Year message last year.
There are pending launches to replace India’s aging assets in space, there are satellites and spacecrafts that are getting built and awaiting launch, there are missions being planned with long delays and above all there is confusion at the level of the ISRO personnel about how the space reforms will affect their work. There is little to no communication about work, failure reports or status updates coming from within ISRO other than these annual letters and seminars in remote corners of the internet that volunteers have to find and share.
All focus now seems to be on the few PSLV launches missed last year because of COVID-19 and the first uncrewed launch of Gaganyaan before the 75th anniversary of India’s independence. Everything else seems expendable and subject to change now.