Contribution of External and Indigenous Technological Elements to India’s Space Capabilities: An Appraisal

Today, India has emerged as a major space faring nation and has acquired end to end capability to design, develop, build, test, launch and manage different type of satellites and planetary spacecraft. Besides building and launching its own satellites, the country is now providing valuable space based services on a commercial basis globally and has launched 319 foreign satellites from 33 countries. And the country’s success in pioneering low cost planetary missions like Chandrayaan-1 and Mars Orbiter Mission has won appreciation from the outside world and further enhanced its status as a major space faring nation. During the evolution of the Indian space programme in the past five decades, both externally acquired and indigenously developed space technological elements have contributed to India’s ability to accumulate various space capabilities. This research work explores the factors that contributed for India’s success in a high technology and challenging area like space in the national, regional and international contexts. At the same time, the nature and extent of contribution of both externally acquired and indigenous technological elements to India’s space capabilities, especially the current capabilities in the context of India achieving the status of a space faring nation with significant capabilities is explored in depth. In addition, given the changing global geopolitics, the research in particular investigates what played positive role in forcing for the other developed space faring nations to offer external support to the Indian space programme in the past. In short, this holistic and comprehensive doctoral research approaches the subject from a technological perspective with a historical approach. Thus, various elements of the Indian space programme, including the satellites, the sounding rockets, the launch vehicles, launch and in-orbit management infrastructure, space exploration and space application domains as well as the international space cooperation programme of ISRO come under the purview of this research. Both space technology acquisition and development by India are deliberated and analysed in detail to ascertain their strength and contribution to India’s space capabilities