2008-04-29

MUMBAI - India's 12-storey high Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C9) flung out 10 satellites one by one 630 kilometers above the Earth after take-off on the morning of April 28, and with that flowering of metal consolidated India's commercial space business in a club dominated by the United States, Europe and Russia.

The 12th successive successful flight of the 15-year old PSLV series was "a perfect, flawless launch operation", the balding Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, said on live national television, as his white-jacketed colleagues beamed joyfully at cracking an Asian record.

Monday's launch marked several firsts for the Indian Space



Research Organization (ISRO), according to agency reports. It was the first time an ISRO rocket carried 10 satellites at a time, the first time a mini satellite was designed and sent up and the first time the Indian space agency utilized the optimum capacity of the PSLV’s core alone configuration, that is without booster rockets, the reports said.

Indian news reports that the flight broke the previous record of eight satellites launched at one go by a Russian rocket, appear off target, however.

A Russian Dnepr carrier rocket plonked 16 microsatellites in orbit in April 2007, according to Roskosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency in a Russian embassy press release that month. Another report says the 16-microsatellite Russian launch had a combined payload of 300 kg. India's PSLV-C9 had an 823-kg payload and can be geared to haul up to 1,200 kgs.

India's CARTOSAT-2A was the primary passenger aboard the PSLV-C9, a 690-kg satellite with the latest imaging equipment that enables tracking of objects less than one meter across back on Earth.

The payload also include a 83-kg Indian Mini Satellite-1, was put into orbit to test new technologies involved in future space projects, and eight micro-satellites with a total weight of about 50 kg for clients from Canada, Denmark, Germany and Netherlands.

Helping to attract customers is the success rate of India's satellite launch program allied to competitive fees. "Our satellite launch fees range from US$20,000 per kg to $36,000 per kg," said Sridhara Murthy, managing director of the Bangalore-based Antrix Corporation Limited, the marketing agency of the Department of Space (DOS) that oversees India's space activities.

The fees are reported to be between 30% to 60% less than those of the competition, though Murthy did not wish to confirm the figure. India's current share of the more than $106 billion global satellite market is a non-audited estimate of $224 million. ISRO earnings come largely from transponder leasing (48%), satellite launches and allied services (18%) and selling remote sensing data (8%), with the balance from custom-building satellites.

India is cashing in on growing global demand for satellites. US-based industry researcher Futron Corporation says world satellite industry revenues averaged 10.5% growth from 2001 to 2006 with services growing 19% from 2005 to 2006 courtesy of demand for global satellite television.

"The satellite industry finds itself in the midst of a robust period of business activity," Futron says in its analysis of 2007 business, with greater consumer demand for high-definition TV (HDTV) and broadband Internet access through satellite.

India and China are joining Europe and "a resurgent Russia" in challenging the dominance in "all three major dimensions of space competitiveness - government, human capital and industry" historically enjoyed by the United States, according to Futron. Other nations listed in Futron's Space Competitiveness Index (SCI) 2008 analyzing space and related activity are Brazil, Canada, Israel, Japan and South Korea.

Even so, India and China have much to do to catch the market leaders. "China and India are orders of magnitude behind the US and Europe, and trail Russia as well," says Andrea Maletor, a senior Futron analyst with over 25 years experience in the global satellite and telecommunications industry. "Major factors here include immature and non-transparent government policy and organizational structures, lower overall investment, lack of commercial operations, [and] not being part of the International Space Station."

India's 10-packer satellite launch pointed to the growing threat of space debris from sick and dead satellites as the business booms.

Futron's database "shows approximately 1,180 active satellites of all types in Earth orbit," says Andrea of Futron. "The past two years have had strong orders, meaning 2008-2010 should have many launches."

Abandoned satellites, as one piece or crumbling into debris, number about 10,000 objects in the higher orbits of around 800 km, estimates Sridhara Murthy of Antrix.

"Approximately 17,000 objects larger than 10 cm are known to exist," according to the NASA Orbital Debris Programme Office, besides about 200,000 particles between one and 10 cm diameter and "tens of millions" of debris lesser than one cm.

The space debris hurtles at speeds of around 25,000 km/hour. "At such speeds, colliding debris weighing even a fraction of a kilogram can damage a satellite," says Murthy. "The debris problem is no cause for alarm as yet but cannot be ignored."

The Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), formed in 1993 seems to recognize the problem but is yet to be fully awake to it.

The IADC members (national space agencies of Italy, Britain, France, China, Germany, the European Space Agency, India, USA, Japan, Ukraine and Russia) developed guidelines for protecting space from debris, guidelines later endorsed in 2007 by the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

But the IADC seems itself to have gone into its own orbit and lost touch with base, as its last technical report on space debris is dated 1999, and its compiled list of reported space debris is rather idiosyncratic. The only entry in the list of "objects discovered in 2004" was Argentina notifying that a cylindrical, metallic space object 40-kg in weight, 1.6 meter long and 1.4 meter wide had popped out of a Delta-2 launcher in 1993. A few disasters may be necessary before disaster management gains priority.

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