The story of India’s space programme – and why it took off

Good morning.

Last week India became the fourth ever country to land a spacecraft on the moon, and the first to touch down successfully near its south pole. It was hailed as a success for “budget” missions, with the project costing £60m, less than half of the £131m it cost Christopher Nolan to make his 2014 space epic, Interstellar.

The triumph was greeted with wild excitement in India, with the prime minister, Narendra Modi, saying it “mirrors the aspirations and capabilities of 1.4 billion Indians”.

Others point out that 280 million of those Indian citizens still don’t have toilets, and perhaps Modi should fix that before funding further space exploration. In the UK, the usual voices are using the lunar landing to further their argument that we should stop sending aid to India.

But are such criticisms fair? For today’s newsletter I talked to Martin Barstow, professor of astrophysics and space science, and director of strategic partnerships at Space Park Leicester, which was opened by British astronaut Tim Peake last year.

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A short history of India’s space programme

India’s space programme was established in 1962, a year after John F Kennedy set a target to land an American on the moon by the end of the decade. But it wasn’t until the 1970s and 80s that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) really got going, using satellites to map and survey crops, monitor damage from natural disasters and erosion, and to bring telemedicine and telecommunication to remote rural areas.

The country now has one of the world’s largest space programmes. It designs, builds, launches, operates and tracks the full spectrum of satellites, rockets and lunar and interplanetary probes. It brings priceless prestige to India: witness Modi’s beaming face at the meeting of the Brics emerging nations this week, when he declared the lunar landing “the movement for new, developing India”. He resisted the temptation to draw comparisons with the Russian delegation’s effort – their Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the moon four days earlier.

How India paid for it

In short, it operates to a tight budget and manages to outperform expectations. The ISRO has a reputation for parsimony, with Indian space scientists paid one-fifth of the global average, according to a former ISRO chair. And although India’s government allocated the equivalent of £1.3bn for the department of space for the fiscal year ending in March, it spent about 25% less. By contrast, Nasa has a £20bn budget for the current year.

In any case, Martin Barstow has no truck with the argument that it’s ridiculous for India to spend anything on space exploration when 10% of its population still live below the $2.15 a day poverty line.

“I see this argument all the time and it is really missing the point. The space science bit is a very small fraction of the programme,” says Barstow. Most of it is spent “keeping people alive” on Earth, he adds. “That’s helping people with agriculture, helping people in poor areas who don’t have good communication or infrastructure. It’s really about developing the country.”

He hears the same arguments in the UK. “People ask: ‘Why do we do space in the UK? We can spend that money building hospitals.’ But all the money you spend in space isn’t really spent in space. It is spent on the ground. It pays people’s wages, it develops high-tech jobs. It supports economic growth. In the UK, space brings £17bn a year to the economy.”

Is it time for the UK to stop sending aid to India?

The Foreign Office, which distributes aid, sent India £33.4m in cash in 2022/23. Former Brexit party MEP Ben Habib said the lunar landing showed it was time for the UK to stop sending India any money at all: “It is odd, to put it mildly, that the UK gives increasing amounts of aid to India, a country with a space programme and an economy bigger than our own,” he grumbled.

Barstow sees it differently: “We still need to support India, which remains a poor country,” he says. GDP per capita in India is £1,789, compared with £36,863 in the UK. Almost 20% of Indian households – about 280 million people – do not use any toilet facility, according to India’s national family health survey. Then there are arguments about the soft power that such aid allows the UK to wield and reparations owed to India due to the legacies of empire, neither of which claims are dented by India’s supposed extravagance in investing in space exploration.

What next for India’s space ambitions?

Next, India wants to send three astronauts into space with a mission called Gaganyaan. Although an Indian flew to orbit on a Soviet spacecraft in 1984, the country has never managed this feat on its own. The project was scheduled to be complete by 2023 but has faced numerous delays.

It also hopes to launch another mission to Mars, after its Mangalyaan orbiter successfully observed the planet from 2014 to 2022. A solar observatory called Aditya-L1 is also in the pipeline, as well as an Earth observation satellite built jointly with Nasa.

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