ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization is finally in work on its encouragement to the nation’s private firms for the past few years on space projects.
The 3-year agreement includes three companies collaborating with ISRO: Alpha Design Technologies from Bengaluru, Tata Group from Hyderabad, and state-owned Bharat Electronics Ltd., also from Bengaluru. It is expected that the consortium will be able to launch 7 to 9 satellites per year for 3 years. That’s 27 satellites at most within the time span.
These satellites are supposed to be weighing between 1.5 and 3 tons and will be purposeful for imaging, weather forecasting, and of course, communication. This was said by a private firm official remaining anonymous.
Presently, ISRO takes care of 3 to 4 launches per year. However, the aim is to take the number from 16 to 18, as requested by the government.
Our in-house capacity is limited. So we are looking to offload 30-40% of the work to the private sector. – Dr. M Annadurai, director of the ISRO satellite center
The consortium ensures enough resources are brought to ISRO to accomplish its objective.
In the procedure of building capacity, ISRO is as well in concert with U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), who is included in the subjective 3-year agreement. As per URSC’s website, it has further taken up the responsibility to “promote participation of the Indian industry from spacecraft subsystems to spacecraft assembly, integration, and testing.”
Stats say that ISRO has so far launched a total of 89 Indian satellites successfully. The organization exclusively contributes to its homeland’s implementations in the field of space-fairing. Additionally, it launched 9 student satellites and 237 customer satellites covering 28 other countries.
After completion of signing the agreement, the three participating private companies were initially provided with a technical presentation that entails the work scope and contract execution modality.
