The Hesitant Orbit

In order to march boldly ahead into the deep space, New Delhi must work towards building a station, boost its techno-economic planning and use the Indian Space Research Organisation smartly.

- Chaitanya Giri

THE 2020s WILL be a decade of space stations. The well-established space powers — Beijing, Moscow, Washington, Paris, Tokyo and the newer entrants, Abu Dhabi and Luxembourg, are constructing next-generation space stations that will usher in a new wave of industrialisation.

Washington and Moscow, continuing their existing collaboration on the International Space Station (ISS), the inter-governmental space mega project being operated for scientific and diplomatic purposes, recently signed a joint statement on the construction of a space station — a deemed Deep Space Gateway that will orbit the moon. With sophisticated technological capabilities and finances available, it now seems possible to build a semi-permanent habitat in deep space.

It is disconcerting that India is the only trillion-dollar economy in the world, currently, with neither a space station nor involvement in a multilateral project to build one. It has no strategic preparedness of its own for assembling one.

The Indian space programme can be credited with many achievements, but sustained growth is not one of them. Short-term techno-economic planning and lack of political will to improve the nation’s infrastructure are largely to blame for this. If New Delhi were to construct a space station indigenously, it will have to begin a long-drawn-out process of rationale-building, strategic planning, and resource allocation, as was recently made clear in the preamble to the inauguration of the Indian high-speed mega rail project.