Multiply, Don't Substitute: From ISRO to a National Space Ecosystem

1. India's Space Question Has Changed

India's space programme has entered an interesting institutional moment.

In early September 2026, nine employee associations representing personnel across the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) sought written clarity from its Chairman and the Department of Space over reports and public statements concerning the transfer of some manufacturing and operational functions to private companies and public-sector undertakings. Their concerns were not a rejection of private participation. They sought clarity over where the boundary would lie between expanding India's private space industry and withdrawing ISRO from capabilities that its employees regarded as core to the organisation's technical competence, institutional memory, and strategic role. The concerns emerged just as India was preparing for the ninth Bengaluru Space Expo, where the country's rapidly expanding private space ecosystem was on full display.

ISRO responded on 6 September with an unusually categorical clarification: it would neither be privatised nor have its importance diminished. It would remain India's principal institution for advanced space research and technology development, national and strategic missions, space science and exploration, and critical and frontier space capabilities. At the same time, ISRO made an equally important point: private participation was intended to allow industry to scale mature technologies while ISRO concentrated more strongly on next-generation technologies and complex national missions.

At the Expo, ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan acknowledged that the employees' concerns were genuine and would be addressed — but also explained why India could not build its future space programme through ISRO alone. India currently has around 56 operational space assets, he noted, while national requirements could call for 200–300 satellites over the next six or seven years and around 50 launches a year. Indian industry is already deeply embedded in ISRO's launch programme: roughly 80 per cent of the budget of a rocket launch is invested in Indian industry, with around 450 industries working with ISRO.

There is therefore no real contradiction in saying that ISRO must remain strong and that private participation must expand dramatically. The apparent contradiction arises only if we imagine that national space capability is a fixed quantity — that whatever moves from ISRO to industry is necessarily lost to the public system. It need not be.

The more useful question is whether India can turn one set of capabilities into several: an ISRO that remains technically deep and capable of pushing the frontier; public-sector enterprises that provide scale where appropriate; private companies that manufacture, launch, operate, commercialise, and innovate; universities that continuously generate knowledge and talent; and public institutions capable of governing an increasingly complex ecosystem. That is a different, and much bigger, question than whether ISRO should be privatised.

India's space programme has spent decades demonstrating that the country can build sophisticated spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, scientific missions, navigation systems, remote-sensing capabilities, and increasingly ambitious planetary missions. The next phase is not simply about doing more of the same. It is about building a national system in which capabilities can multiply without the institutions that created them becoming hollow.

The question is no longer whether India should embrace the space economy — it has already begun to. The question is how India should architect the space ecosystem so that private participation expands national capability rather than merely relocating it.

My earlier argument was that India's space sector could become an important economic and social development engine. That proposition remains valid. But the growth of a space economy raises a harder institutional question: what must remain within India's public capability even as more activities become commercial?

The answer cannot simply be that everything currently done by ISRO must remain within ISRO — that would make it difficult to achieve the scale India now requires. Nor can the answer be that everything industry is capable of doing should eventually be removed from ISRO — that could leave India with a thriving private space industry but a weakened public institution, at the very moment when the frontier is moving towards reusable launch systems, human spaceflight, a national space station, lunar missions, planetary exploration, deep-space systems, and increasingly autonomous spacecraft.

India needs a third approach: capability multiplication.

2. Private Participation Is No Longer the Question

The expansion of private participation in India's space sector is no longer a matter of ideological choice. It is a practical necessity. A modern space programme requires enormous quantities of hardware, components, electronics, propulsion systems, software, ground infrastructure, launch capacity, data services, communications systems, and specialised manufacturing — along with the ability to respond quickly to commercial demand and compete in global markets. A government research organisation cannot, and need not, perform all of these functions itself.

The purpose of opening the sector to private participation should be understood not as replacing ISRO, but as creating capabilities India did not previously possess at sufficient scale. This distinction is fundamental.

Suppose ISRO develops a technology and a private company subsequently manufactures it at much greater scale. If ISRO retains the knowledge, engineering competence, testing capability, and ability to develop the next generation, India has gained an additional capability. But suppose the same process eventually leaves ISRO without the engineers, facilities, operational experience, or institutional learning required to understand and reproduce that capability — India may then have transferred a capability rather than multiplied it.

The difference can be expressed as:

Capability multiplication: ISRO capability + private capability = greater national capability.

Capability substitution: ISRO capability – transferred capability + private capability = capability relocated from one institution to another.

The objective of reform should be the first, not the second. This does not mean every ISRO technology must remain permanently in government hands, or that public institutions should compete unnecessarily with commercial companies. A mature space economy needs specialisation. What it cannot afford is institutional amnesia.

There is a natural tendency to read public-sector withdrawal from a mature activity as evidence of progress. Sometimes it is: if industry can manufacture a mature satellite bus more efficiently and at greater scale, there is little reason for ISRO to devote scarce scientific manpower to routine production. But manufacturing is not merely manufacturing when the underlying technology is still changing rapidly. The institution that designs, builds, tests, launches, and operates a system learns things that cannot always be captured in drawings, manuals, patents, or technology-transfer documents — how components fail, how systems interact under stress, which tolerances matter, which apparently minor anomalies are early warnings of major failure. That knowledge matters especially in space, where failure is expensive, sometimes irreversible, and often separated from the original engineering decision by thousands of kilometres and years.

The objective, then, should be to let industry absorb mature activities without letting the public system lose the capacity to understand, reproduce, improve, and replace them when necessary. I call this public capability floor: the minimum level of in-house capability a strategically important public institution must continuously exercise to retain competence, institutional memory, and the ability to move back into a domain when circumstances require it. The precise floor will differ by technology and over time. It need not mean keeping the entire production chain inside ISRO — only enough of the chain to keep the learning loop alive.

This is also why India's space reforms should not be judged simply by how many activities have moved outside ISRO. The more useful question is how much additional capability India has acquired as a result. A successful transition should leave India with a stronger ISRO, a stronger industrial base, stronger universities, more skilled people, more suppliers, more technological knowledge, and a larger commercial market. That is capability multiplication.

3. Mature Technology Does Not Mean Institutional Exit

A technology can become mature without the institution that developed it becoming dispensable — particularly in strategic technologies, where an institution's value lies not merely in what it currently produces but in its ability to reproduce knowledge and generate the next generation of capability.

Consider launch vehicles. Once a launch vehicle becomes reliable and production becomes routine, there is an obvious case for industrial participation — manufacturing components, integrating systems, establishing production lines, eventually undertaking commercial launches. But maturity in the vehicle does not mean India's public space institution should stop understanding launch vehicles. The next generation may require radically different propulsion, reusability, new materials, autonomous flight, larger payloads, or entirely new architectures. If ISRO retains the underlying engineering competence, industrialisation becomes a force multiplier; if it loses that competence, industrialisation risks becoming a one-way transfer.

Commercialisation should move capacity outward. It should not necessarily move competence outward.

This is why the ISRO employee concerns deserve to be taken seriously, even by those who strongly support private participation. Their argument, at its most substantive, is about institutional memory, not employment. The employee associations argued that launch-vehicle design, realisation, integration, testing, and launch constitute core competence and strategic capability. One need not accept every implication of their position to recognise the underlying institutional question: a public research organisation accumulates tacit knowledge over decades, and its laboratories, engineers, technicians, scientists, and operational teams form a living repository of it. Some of that knowledge can be transferred, some documented, some commercialised — but some exists primarily because people continue to practise the activity.

This is why a public capability floor is more useful than a simple division between "public" and "private" activities. The relevant question is:

What level of in-house activity must ISRO continue to perform so that India retains independent competence in strategically important technologies?

The answer should not be identical for every technology. Routine manufacturing may require only a small public presence once industry is mature. A frontier propulsion technology may require a much deeper public capability. A national launch system may require retained expertise in design, systems integration, testing, launch operations, and failure analysis even if most physical production is undertaken by industry. Satellite manufacturing can become highly commercialised without requiring ISRO to abandon spacecraft engineering.

This suggests a sharper principle for technology transfer: do not exit a capability merely because it has matured. Exit only when the external ecosystem can reproduce the capability, the national learning loop remains intact, and the public institution can still understand and advance the technology. That is a much higher standard than simply asking whether a private company can perform the task.

There is also a strategic reason for holding to it. Space is an unusually unforgiving technological environment. A country may depend on commercial partners for components, manufacturing, launch services, communications, or data - but it still needs institutions capable of understanding the systems on which national missions depend. Strategic autonomy does not mean manufacturing everything domestically. It means retaining enough knowledge and capability to make meaningful strategic choices.

India should therefore be comfortable with a much larger private space industry, and should actively want private companies to get better at manufacturing, launching, operating, servicing, analysing, and commercialising space systems. But the expansion of industry should be accompanied by an expansion of national capability, not the gradual shrinking of the institution that created much of the original capability. 

The test policy-makers should keep in view is: when an activity moves from ISRO to industry, does India gain another centre of competence, or does it merely change the location of the existing one?

4. The DRDO Comparison and the National Ecosystem

The relationship between public research institutions and industry is not unique to space. India's defence sector offers a useful, if imperfect, comparison. The broad defence model divides research from industrial production from military use: the Defence Research and Development Organisation develops technologies, public and private industry increasingly manufactures them, and the Armed Forces operate the systems. Operational experience then returns as feedback for future research, design, procurement, and doctrine. The Armed Forces therefore retain enormous operational memory even when they do not manufacture every system they use.

Space is different. ISRO is not a laboratory that hands its technologies to another institution that becomes the long-term operational memory of the system. In many cases the organisation itself forms the continuous chain: 

research → design → engineering → integration → testing → launch → mission operations → data → scientific and technical learning → next-generation research. 

Operations are part of the research institution's memory. This is why "industry can manufacture it, therefore ISRO no longer needs to do it" is too simple. A company can manufacture a launch vehicle, operate a satellite, even eventually conduct sophisticated lunar or deep-space missions — there is no reason to assume private companies are inherently incapable of any of this. The real question is what ISRO must continue to do so that India retains an institution capable of understanding, advancing, and operating the frontier of space technology.

DRDO can increasingly rely on industry for production because the Armed Forces carry the operational responsibility and memory. ISRO cannot hand over every mature operational capability and assume its research role stays unaffected, because in space, operations themselves are part of the learning system. That does not require ISRO to operate every satellite forever, monopolise launches, or manufacture every component. It requires retaining enough operational depth to keep research connected to reality. A frontier research institution should not lose the ability to build, fly, and operate the systems through which its research becomes knowledge. 

This is becoming more important as India is working towards the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, human spaceflight, reusable launch systems, lunar exploration, planetary missions, deep-space communications, autonomous spacecraft, and in-space servicing — engineering and operational questions no amount of theoretical research or outsourced production can answer alone. ISRO needs to move up the technological frontier without abandoning the engineering layers below it. The private sector can and should build an enormous commercial space economy around it; ISRO's role is not to compete with these companies but to keep moving the frontier, which requires the ability to learn from the very systems occupying it.

This is also why the transition should be understood not as ISRO shrinking and private companies growing, but as one organisation becoming a node in a wider ecosystem. For decades ISRO was necessarily at the centre of almost the entire ecosystem — conducting research, designing spacecraft and launch vehicles, building, testing, launching, operating, training, and accumulating institutional knowledge, with industry participating substantially but within an ecosystem whose principal architect and customer was the state. That model suited the stage of development India was at. It is no longer sufficient for the stage India is entering: less a programme run by one organisation, more an ecosystem of differentiated capabilities, where different institutions become good at different things while remaining connected to one another.

The Department of Space provides strategic stewardship and policy direction. ISRO remains the principal public institution for advanced research, technology development, national and strategic missions, and frontier capabilities. Public-sector enterprises provide industrial scale and infrastructure. Private companies bring entrepreneurial experimentation, manufacturing capacity, commercial discipline, new business models, and access to global markets. Universities generate fundamental knowledge and specialised talent. A capable regulator ensures the system develops safely and in line with national interests. The objective is not to make these institutions interchangeable but complementary. A country can have many private space companies and still possess weak national capability if it lacks the research institutions, skilled people, infrastructure, regulatory knowledge, and institutional memory to sustain the sector; conversely, a country can have a modest commercial industry while possessing enormous strategic and scientific capability. India has the opportunity to build both.

The challenge is architectural: how to distribute activity without fragmenting capability. The answer is neither a rigid hierarchy in which every organisation reports to ISRO, nor a loose collection of actors connected only by contracts and markets. The ecosystem needs interfaces: universities connecting with ISRO and industry, ISRO connecting with private manufacturers, government creating demand where markets are not yet mature, the regulator drawing on technical knowledge outside itself, data from space systems flowing into agriculture, water management, disaster response, defence, climate science, and urban planning. Think of the ecosystem less as a pyramid and more as a network — and networks require strong nodes. ISRO is one of those nodes, and retaining a strong ISRO becomes more, not less, important as the ecosystem expands, because a distributed system needs institutions capable of systems integration when hundreds of companies, laboratories, suppliers, and international partners are contributing to a single mission. A strong public institution can perform that role without monopolising every activity.

This reframes the privatisation debate. The relevant question is not whether private companies should be allowed to do what ISRO currently does; but, which capabilities should be distributed, which should remain concentrated, which should be shared, and which must be continuously reproduced somewhere within the national system.

5. Separate the Steward From the Institution It Stewards

If India is building a national space ecosystem rather than simply expanding ISRO, a further institutional question follows: who looks at the ecosystem as a whole?

The Department of Space and ISRO have historically been closely intertwined — the Secretary of the Department of Space, Chairman of the Space Commission, and Chairman of ISRO are held by the same person. There are understandable reasons: space is strategically important, and close coordination between policy, administration, funding, research, and mission execution can prevent fragmentation. But as the ecosystem grows more complex, the case for distinguishing stewardship from execution becomes stronger.

The Department of Space should increasingly ask a question different from ISRO's. Its fundamental question should be: what capabilities does India need to possess over the next twenty-five years, and what institutional architecture will let us acquire and retain them? 

ISRO's question should be: what can we research, develop, engineer, build, launch, operate, and learn in order to advance those national objectives? Complementary, but not identical.

The Department of Space should be strengthened as strategic steward of the entire ecosystem, with four broad functions: 

Vision — articulating the capabilities India should possess in 2040, 2050, and beyond, thinking past individual missions and governments. 

Policy — designing the institutional, industrial, international, financial, and technological framework through which those capabilities develop. 

Funding — ensuring strategically important capabilities that markets cannot yet sustain are not abandoned for lack of immediate commercial returns. 

Assurance — continually asking whether India is actually acquiring and retaining the capabilities its strategy requires.

That last function matters most. A government can announce a policy, a regulator can issue licences, a company can raise capital, ISRO can launch missions, a university can produce PhDs — and the country can still fail to acquire a critical capability if nobody periodically asks whether all these activities add up to what India actually needs. Strategic stewardship exists to answer that question, without turning the Department of Space into another layer of operational bureaucracy or letting it micromanage ISRO, industry, universities, or the regulator. Its purpose is to maintain the bird's-eye view — seeing the entire space system while letting its constituent institutions specialise.

This matters more as private participation grows. If government simply opens activities to private companies and waits for the market to determine the outcome, it may discover a decade later that some capabilities flourished while others quietly disappeared. Markets are excellent at discovering commercially valuable opportunities; they are not designed to guarantee national strategic capability. The state has to distinguish between the two — not as an argument against markets, but as an argument for knowing what markets are and are not built to do. A private company should pursue a commercially attractive opportunity; the national system should separately ask what happens if a capability becomes strategically important but commercially unattractive. That is precisely where public stewardship becomes necessary.

Separating stewardship from execution would also make the ecosystem more coherent. ISRO would not have to simultaneously act as research institution, industrial producer, commercial participant, policy adviser, regulator, and ecosystem coordinator — it could concentrate on its distinctive strengths. That would not weaken ISRO. It would let ISRO become more ISRO.

6. Make ISRO One Organisation—Without Making Its Centres Identical

A further reform matters precisely because ISRO is being asked to occupy a more specialised role. ISRO is called an organisation, but in practice it is a collection of highly specialised centres and facilities with distinct histories, technical cultures, and areas of expertise. That diversity has been one of its strengths, and India should not erase it: a propulsion centre should not be made to resemble a space applications centre, and scientific research requires different institutional cultures from manufacturing or mission operations. Specialisation is good. 

But specialisation should not become institutional separation. As the ecosystem around ISRO expands, the organisation may need greater executive and strategic coherence — its centres retaining their identities and technical depth, but the organisation as a whole functioning more clearly as one ISRO. This is not chiefly about titles. The substantive question is whether ISRO has enough organisational coherence to make decisions across its centres about mission architecture, technology priorities, talent, infrastructure, resources, partnerships, and long-term capability. A distributed ecosystem needs a strong systems integrator: if one centre develops propulsion, another a spacecraft, another communications, another applications research, and private companies manufacture components, someone must be able to see the mission as a whole. That should be ISRO.

The principle: decentralised technical capability, combined with central strategic and executive coherence. This could also improve ISRO's relationship with industry. A fragmented public institution makes industrial collaboration unnecessarily complicated — companies navigating multiple centres, procurement systems, and technical standards without a clear sense of the overall national architecture. A more coherent ISRO could define technology interfaces clearly, specify what it wants industry to provide, establish common standards, and let private companies specialise around a clearer set of requirements. In other words, a stronger ISRO can make outsourcing and private participation easier — organisational consolidation and private participation are not opposites; a capable systems integrator can distribute work far more effectively than a weak one.

Consider what future missions could involve: launch vehicles, propulsion, spacecraft, sensors, communications, navigation, robotics, autonomous systems, power systems, thermal systems, ground stations, software, data processing, life-support systems, and specialised instruments — many increasingly sourced from outside ISRO. That makes the ability to integrate them more important, not less. ISRO's future strength should be measured not only by how much physical production stays inside its own facilities, but by how much of India's increasingly distributed space capability it can understand, integrate, test, operate, and learn from. Its identity should remain distinctive even as its role evolves: less a vertically integrated producer of everything, more a deep public technology institution and national systems integrator. But systems integration cannot be outsourced wholesale — someone must retain the knowledge of how the pieces fit together. If every component of a future programme is commercialised but the public institution loses the ability to understand the architecture as a whole, India may end up with a sophisticated supply chain and no corresponding sovereign systems capability. The goal should be the opposite: many capable institutions, connected by an even more capable ISRO.

7. Different Institutions, Different Horizons

Once India accepts that space capability is distributed across institutions, a further mistake must be avoided: expecting all of them to operate on the same time horizon. They should not. A private company has to think about customers, revenues, financing, and commercial viability — even an ambitious space company ultimately answers to investors, employees, and the economics of the business. A university may work on a problem for a decade before its significance becomes apparent. ISRO can undertake a mission because it is nationally important even with no commercial case. The Department of Space can support a capability India may need twenty years from now. These are not contradictions; they are different institutional purposes, and India should avoid judging every part of the ecosystem by the same metric of immediate commercial return.

This distinction sharpens as India moves beyond the traditional Earth-orbit economy. The commercial horizon may remain concentrated, at least initially, around communications, Earth observation, satellite manufacturing, launch, in-space services, data, and other applications with identifiable customers. India's national space horizon extends much further — human spaceflight, a space station, lunar exploration, planetary missions, deep-space science, advanced propulsion, autonomous systems — into questions whose economic value cannot yet be estimated. India should not ask its private companies to behave like ISRO, or ISRO to behave like a private company. The two horizons reinforce each other: a commercial launch industry lowers the cost of access to orbit; a commercial satellite industry builds manufacturing depth; a private Earth-observation ecosystem generates data; commercial communications build ground infrastructure and operational expertise — all of which can support more ambitious public missions, while public missions in turn create technologies, standards, demand, and scientific knowledge that open new commercial opportunities.

This is the real promise of an ecosystem: not a compromise between public and private sectors, but a mechanism through which different institutions operating on different horizons contribute to a common national capability. Which returns us to the central issue. India should not ask whether an activity belongs permanently to the public or private sector. It should ask which institution is best placed to perform a function at the current stage of technological and commercial maturity, and what capability India must retain while that function evolves. The architecture should be flexible enough to accommodate different answers for different technologies without losing sight of the larger national objective. India's space future should not be conceived as the gradual replacement of ISRO by private companies — it should be conceived as the emergence of many more institutions capable of doing many more things, with ISRO retaining the depth and coherence necessary to keep the national technological frontier moving.

8. Capability and Talent Circulation: Space as Generator for the Wider Economy

There is another reason to think about India's space sector as a national capability ecosystem rather than simply an emerging industry: space does not merely consume capabilities developed elsewhere. Increasingly, it can become a generator of capabilities for the wider economy — and, correspondingly, a generator of talent that circulates well beyond it.

Historically the relationship ran mostly one way: space programmes drew on developments in electronics, telecommunications, materials science, computing, propulsion, optics, medicine, manufacturing, and mathematics, acting as an extraordinarily demanding customer for technologies that originated outside it. But as the frontier of space technology advances, the flow increasingly runs both ways. A technology developed for autonomous spacecraft may find applications in industrial robotics, autonomous vehicles, defence, or logistics. Advanced materials developed for extreme space environments may apply to aerospace, energy, electronics, and precision manufacturing. Space-grade sensors can contribute to medical devices, industrial inspection, and environmental monitoring. Earth-observation capabilities can transform agriculture, water management, disaster response, and urban planning. Space medicine can inform terrestrial medicine; closed-loop life-support systems can advance resource efficiency and recycling; additive manufacturing developed for space can contribute to distributed manufacturing on Earth.

Not every space technology will automatically produce a terrestrial application — that would be unrealistic. Spillovers require institutions capable of recognising them, transferring knowledge, adapting technologies, financing experimentation, and absorbing new capabilities: universities, industrial companies, start-ups, public laboratories, standards institutions, and government procurement all matter here. The space ecosystem's wider contribution to the economy may therefore be much larger than its own industry's revenues suggest. The direction of travel should be understood as a loop:

Earth capabilities → space → new capabilities → wider economy → more advanced space capabilities.

If capability is to circulate this way, people must circulate too — and this is where talent policy should follow the same logic. The conventional question is how many people the space sector needs. The better question is how many people India should expose to the knowledge, disciplines, technologies, and problems the space ecosystem generates — because not all of them should, or need to, remain within the sector. A scientist trained in planetary geology need not spend an entire career on planetary missions; an engineer trained in spacecraft autonomy may move into robotics; a materials scientist trained around the extreme requirements of space may move into semiconductors, automobiles, or energy. That is not leakage from the space sector. It is capability diffusion, and it is one of the more important social and economic benefits the space programme can offer — the sector becoming one of the country's capability nodes for advanced talent.

This requires deliberate design, and a clear distinction: people should circulate widely; technologies should circulate deliberately. 

Human mobility generally expands the diffusion of knowledge and can be encouraged through internships, apprenticeships, traineeships, fellowships, doctoral and post-doctoral programmes, visiting scientists, joint research projects, and secondments between universities, ISRO, PSUs, regulators, and private companies — moving people between sectors rather than capturing them permanently in one. 

Technology transfer is a different matter: it involves intellectual property, national security, dual-use concerns, export controls, liability, licensing, and testing requirements, and needs much more carefully designed institutional mechanisms. India should build the capacity to manage both, without assuming that every useful technology must immediately be transferred or commercialised.

Universities matter especially here. India's space ambitions require a much larger pool of researchers who understand not only current spacecraft and launch technologies but also what will matter in the next generation. A student working on robotics today may contribute to a lunar mission a decade from now, and to an industrial automation company a decade after that — the value of the training does not disappear when the person changes sector. Fellowships and joint programmes should not be designed merely as recruitment pipelines for one organisation, and universities should not become outsourced training departments for industry; the objective is a population capable of working at the technological frontier, in institutions demanding enough to force scientists and engineers across disciplinary boundaries. A spacecraft does not care whether an academic department calls something mechanical engineering, electronics, computer science, materials science, or medicine — a mission requires these disciplines to work together, and India's talent system should reflect that.

9. Build Research Institutions Several Generations Ahead

A country cannot build long-term space capability by researching only what it plans to launch next. India needs research institutions working several generations ahead of current missions — human spaceflight, lunar exploration, deep-space missions, autonomous systems, advanced robotics, communications, life-support systems, space medicine, materials, sensors, artificial intelligence, and planetary science all demand knowledge that cannot be produced on the timetable of a single mission.

This requires a network of universities and specialist institutions with long-duration research programmes, developing serious academic strength in planetary science, astrophysics and cosmology, space materials, advanced propulsion, robotics and autonomy, deep-space communications, space weather, astrobiology, advanced sensing, power systems, life-support technologies, orbital mechanics, and space medicine. The purpose should not be academic departments that exist merely to serve the next ISRO mission, but knowledge built several steps ahead of the mission pipeline, along a progressively shifting horizon: 

Earth and near-Earth orbit → lunar systems → planetary exploration → deep space → the more distant frontiers of space science. 

India does not need to pretend interstellar science is around the corner, but it does need institutions capable of beginning the underlying research long before a mission becomes politically or technologically feasible. That is how serious scientific capability is built.

The Department of Space has a role here too — not directing the details of academic research, but maintaining a long-term view of where national capability needs to develop, identifying major capability domains for the next twenty-five or thirty years and working backwards to the research, infrastructure, and talent required today. ISRO and universities should maintain a continuous interface beyond contracts: ISRO scientists teaching and supervising, university researchers working on problems arising from future missions, doctoral students accessing relevant laboratories, joint programmes letting knowledge circulate in both directions — not simply to supply ISRO with trained manpower, but to keep the knowledge base of the national space system continuously renewed. This matters because frontier institutions can become victims of their own success: an organisation that has mastered one generation of technology can become very good at reproducing it while gradually losing contact with what comes next. Universities help prevent that closure by providing intellectual diversity and exposure to unconventional ideas; ISRO provides the discipline of real systems and operational experience; industry provides the pressure of cost and competition; the regulator provides an understanding of risk and consequence. A national space ecosystem becomes genuinely powerful when these forms of knowledge continuously interact.

10. Build Ambitiously—but Don't Build a Space Bubble

This ambition needs one caution attached to it. The sector is attracting capital, start-ups, government support, and public enthusiasm — necessary if India is to build capabilities historically concentrated in a handful of countries. But enthusiasm should not be confused with sustainable demand. Launch capacity could grow faster than paying demand; satellite constellations could proliferate faster than viable business models; Earth-observation companies could generate more data than customers are willing to buy; ground infrastructure could attract investment on the assumption that demand will automatically follow. Space's physical nature — rockets, satellites, launch pads, sensors, orbital systems requiring engineering, manufacturing, capital, and testing — makes it different from a software bubble, but not immune to cycles of overinvestment. Government demand itself can distort the picture if companies assume public procurement will indefinitely support capacity commercial customers cannot sustain.

India needs to distinguish between building capability ahead of demand, which is often necessary, and assuming demand will eventually justify every capability built, which is dangerous. A useful discipline is a demand-sustainability test for major commercial investments: where will the demand come from, how deep is the customer base, is it recurring or dependent on one-off government contracts, what happens if procurement slows, can the company serve multiple markets, can the underlying capability be adapted elsewhere? This does not mean every start-up needs a guaranteed business model before support — frontier industries rarely work that way, and some experiments failing is normal. The real policy failure would be emerging from a period of intense investment with neither durable companies nor durable public capability.

The same caution applies to the frequently cited figure of roughly $44 billion by 2033, which originated in IN-SPACe's 2023 long-term projections. It is better understood as an ambitious target scenario than a deterministic forecast, since space technology is not an isolated economic island — its future depends on India's broader industrial development, telecommunications markets, defence requirements, manufacturing capacity, capital availability, and applications that may not yet exist. Rather than asking how the industry should be built to hit a market-size number, the more productive question reverses the logic: what national capabilities would allow India to build a much larger space economy, and what wider capabilities would that economy in turn create? The objective should not be to manufacture a particular number, but to build an ecosystem capable of adapting as markets develop — another reason capability multiplication matters more than simple industrial expansion.

11. More Private Capability Requires More Regulatory Capability

One final capability must strengthen as the ecosystem grows more complex: the capability to regulate it. This is easy to underestimate, since regulation is often treated as something that happens after technology and commerce have done the interesting work — but in advanced technologies that distinction is increasingly untenable. Space regulation involves engineering, physics, telecommunications, remote sensing, data science, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, materials, orbital mechanics, environmental and safety questions, national security, international law, and increasingly complex commercial arrangements. A regulator cannot govern such a sector through legal authority alone; it needs knowledge, and not merely of yesterday's technology.

National space capability should therefore include not only India's ability to conceive, engineer, manufacture, launch, operate, and commercialise space systems, but India's independent ability to understand, assess, govern, and regulate them. Regulatory capability is not an external constraint on the ecosystem — it is part of the ecosystem's national capability. The regulator should have a permanent core of technically qualified specialists, but employing every specialist it might occasionally need would be neither practical nor desirable; India's universities can provide an additional layer, commissioned for technical assessment, testing, validation, modelling, measurement, certification support, and safety analysis.

There must, however, be a clear institutional boundary. A university laboratory providing independent technical assistance to the regulator should not simultaneously consult for the entity whose technology it is helping evaluate — a firewall that should apply whether the regulated party is a private company, a PSU, ISRO, or another government body. Universities will legitimately hold multiple relationships with the ecosystem — research with ISRO here, technology development with a private company there, regulatory-science assistance elsewhere, compliance support for smaller firms somewhere else — and that diversity is desirable. What is not desirable is the same institutional unit occupying both sides of a single regulatory relationship without safeguards. The principle: the laboratory provides independent technical evidence; the regulator exercises regulatory authority. Regulatory science (helping the regulator assess safety and compliance) and regulatory compliance (helping companies meet the rules) are distinct functions that should not be confused, and the regulator should never outsource its authority — nor should a smaller company be disadvantaged for lacking the in-house regulatory expertise of a larger competitor.

12. International Cooperation Must Include Transparency

As more countries and more private companies put satellites into orbit, a further dimension of capability becomes important: international transparency. The next phase of space activity will be too large and interconnected for countries to operate within separate national ecosystems — India will need partnerships in science, launch, communications, Earth observation, human spaceflight, lunar exploration, and debris management. But cooperation cannot mean only joint missions and commercial agreements. As satellite numbers grow, countries will also need greater clarity about what those satellites can actually do.

A satellite does not recognise a national border. A remote-sensing satellite passing over India can observe India regardless of who launched or owns it, and the reverse is equally true. Not every satellite is equally capable — orbit, sensor type, resolution, revisit rate, imaging mode, tasking capability, and communications architecture all determine what a spacecraft can actually do, and the line between civilian and military space activity is becoming less straightforward as dual-use applications multiply. This does not mean private space activity should be treated with suspicion by default. It means ownership is an increasingly poor proxy for capability.

India should support greater international transparency around declared civilian space systems — not publishing sensitive specifications, but standardised disclosure of broad information such as operator, ownership, orbital parameters, declared mission, general system class, approximate capability, and principles governing data dissemination. This would go beyond registering a spacecraft as an object, towards international recognition of its functional capability — an increasingly important distinction, since the world already knows how to register space objects but knows far less consistently what those objects are capable of doing. As commercial constellations multiply, uncertainty itself becomes a source of geopolitical tension: a country watching an unfamiliar satellite repeatedly cross sensitive territory has to make assumptions about its purpose, which may be correct, exaggerated, or wrong. 

Greater transparency cannot eliminate strategic competition, but it can reduce unnecessary ambiguity. India, with its growing space industry and long record of civilian space cooperation, could advocate this approach particularly for declared civilian Earth-observation and other commercially operated systems — evolving international cooperation from missions alone towards infrastructure, standards, transparency, and responsible behaviour. The deeper principle: satellites do not recognise political borders, so international space governance has to.

13. Build the National Space Capability Architecture — and Work Backwards From It

By this point the argument has moved well beyond whether ISRO should manufacture a particular rocket or whether a technology should be transferred to the private sector. The larger question is what constitutes India's national space capability — and the answer is much broader than the space industry.

It begins with national intent: what India wants to achieve in space, and why, requiring a long-term strategic vision rather than a collection of individual missions. 

It requires policy and institutional stewardship, principally through a strengthened Department of Space capable of looking across the whole ecosystem. It requires fundamental research and knowledge generation, across universities and specialised institutions as much as within ISRO. 

It requires ISRO's advanced scientific, engineering, systems-integration, operational, and national-mission capabilities, including the institutional memory needed to retain strategic competence. 

It requires PSUs and private industry able to manufacture, scale, supply, operate, and commercialise. 

It requires infrastructure — launch facilities, testing facilities, ground stations, communications networks, data infrastructure, tracking systems, and eventually infrastructure beyond Earth orbit. It requires markets and commercial demand, since a space economy cannot be sustained indefinitely through public funding alone. It requires talent circulation, so knowledge and skilled people move between universities, public institutions, industry, and the wider economy. 

And it requires something often left out of definitions of space capability: independent, technically competent regulation, able to understand what is being built and deployed, assess risk, set rules, monitor compliance, and adapt as technology changes.

These layers interact rather than operate independently — best visualised not as a hierarchy but as a set of connected layers, from national intent through stewardship and policy, research and knowledge, ISRO's frontier R&D and core engineering, industrial and commercial capability, to infrastructure, operations, data and applications — with regulatory capability, talent, and knowledge circulation cutting across the entire system, and the arrows running in both directions: research informs missions and missions generate new questions; industry scales technologies and also generates new engineering problems; commercial and public demand each fill gaps the other cannot; regulation feeds knowledge back into policy; universities train people who carry knowledge into industry, government, and regulation, and back again.

This also changes how to think about public and private roles: the state does not have to own everything to possess national capability, nor withdraw from everything private companies can do. National capability exists when the country has the institutional ability to ensure the necessary capabilities exist somewhere within the system, remain connected to one another, and can be reproduced and advanced when circumstances require it — a much more demanding standard than ownership, and a better basis for evaluating reforms than the public–private binary. 

Whenever an activity moves from ISRO to industry, the question should be what capability India gains. Whenever a new research institution is proposed, what future capability it creates. Whenever a technology is transferred, how knowledge and learning will continue to circulate. Whenever regulation is designed, whether the regulator has enough independent knowledge to govern intelligently. Whenever government funding is committed, what capability is being created that the market alone may not provide.

India's strategy should ultimately be built backwards from this architecture, working from the future to the present rather than the reverse. This does not mean predicting exactly what the world will look like in 2047/2050 — nobody can — but asking what capabilities India would like to possess by then, and working backwards to what must be built today. Sustained lunar activity by the 2040s requires far more than a lunar mission: launch capability, heavy-lift and possibly reusable systems, spacecraft, communications, navigation, autonomous robotics, power systems, life-support technologies, human-spaceflight expertise, materials, medical research, and a large engineering workforce. Serious planetary and deep-space exploration adds advanced propulsion, deep-space communications, autonomous navigation, long-duration spacecraft systems, radiation protection, and scientific institutions capable of interpreting what such missions discover. Participation in infrastructure beyond Earth orbit adds orbital servicing, in-space manufacturing, logistics, resource utilisation, advanced robotics, resilient communications, and new forms of space law. The point is not to build all of this immediately, but to understand the capability chain far enough in advance that today's decisions are not disconnected from tomorrow's requirements.

The Department of Space should hold this long view concretely — establishing a 25-30-year national space capability roadmap, periodically translated into shorter five-year programmes: the longer roadmap identifying the capabilities India wants, the shorter plans determining which research, infrastructure, industrial capacity, talent pipelines, partnerships, and regulatory changes are required at each stage. Such a framework also makes policy continuity easier as governments, technologies, markets, and individual programmes change while the national capability objective remains more durable. Political leadership is essential — long-term capability requires sustained funding and national commitment — but political backing should not be mistaken for a fully articulated institutional strategy; announcing a spectacular mission is a different task from building the ecosystem required to support ten generations of missions. That is why institutional memory must exist not only inside ISRO but across the wider architecture: the Department of Space holding the long-term strategic picture, ISRO the deep technical and operational memory, universities the fundamental knowledge, industry the manufacturing and commercial expertise, the regulator the knowledge of technologies, risks, and standards. Together these form a kind of national memory — one that matters because the frontier will keep moving, from Earth orbit to the Moon, to sustained lunar infrastructure, to planetary exploration, to deep space, and eventually to questions that today seem remote. India does not have to commit itself to every imaginable destination, but it should avoid building an ecosystem whose ambition is permanently limited by today's commercial market. The purpose of a national capability strategy is precisely to preserve the option of going further.

14. Conclusion: From Space Economy to Space Capability

India's space debate began with a relatively straightforward question: how should the country participate in the emerging space economy? The answer seemed obvious — private investment, private companies, commercial markets, industrial scale, international partnerships. It still does. But the more the ecosystem develops, the clearer it becomes that the real question is much larger. India is not merely building a space industry. It is building a national space capability, and that capability cannot belong to ISRO alone. It must include the Department of Space's ability to think strategically over decades; universities' ability to generate knowledge and talent; ISRO's ability to research, engineer, integrate, launch, operate, and push technological frontiers; PSUs' and private companies' ability to manufacture and commercialise at scale; the wider economy's ability to absorb and regenerate space-derived capabilities; and the regulator's ability to understand and govern increasingly complex technologies independently.

The system should not be designed around the question who should do this — government or private industry? It should be designed around a more fundamental one: what capabilities must India possess, and which institutions are best placed to create, retain, reproduce, and advance them? Sometimes the answer will be ISRO, sometimes a private company, sometimes a PSU, sometimes a university, sometimes all of them together — and the important thing is that the national system should become more capable as the division of labour becomes more sophisticated.

That is why the current discussion around ISRO matters. The employee concerns about the possible erosion of in-house capability should not be dismissed as mere resistance to reform. Equally, private industry's legitimate demand for a much larger role should not be treated as a threat to the public programme. Both concerns can be accommodated if the objective is capability multiplication: allowing mature technologies to move outward, letting private companies build businesses around them, allowing competition, investment, and commercial experimentation to expand — while simultaneously protecting the public capability floor required for institutional memory, strategic autonomy, frontier research, and systems integration. The more sophisticated the ecosystem becomes, the more sophisticated its regulation must become; independent regulatory knowledge is itself a national capability, not an administrative afterthought. The people trained through the ecosystem should be seen not merely as future employees of the space industry but as contributors to India's wider technological transformation, and the technologies it generates should be valued not only for what they do in space but for what they eventually contribute to robotics, manufacturing, electronics, medicine, agriculture, water management, telecommunications, energy, and defence.

This is ultimately why the frequently cited size of the future space economy — $44 billion or any other number — should not become the central objective. A market-size target tells us how large an industry might become; it does not tell us how capable a country will become. The more meaningful measures are direct: can India build more sophisticated spacecraft, launch more frequently and reliably, operate complex missions, manufacture advanced components domestically, generate frontier space science, create globally competitive companies, carry space-derived knowledge into the wider economy, regulate technologies it understands as deeply as those it regulates, and retain the institutional memory needed to keep moving the frontier? If the answer to these questions becomes increasingly yes, the space economy will follow.

The ultimate objective, then, is not simply to make India a larger participant in the global space market. It is to make India a country with the scientific, technological, industrial, institutional, regulatory, and human capability to decide for itself how far into space it wishes to go.

India does not need to privatise ISRO. It needs to multiply its space capability.