Primary goal of space sector reforms is to enhance its ecosystem: ISRO chairman

The government will soon roll out a space policy to ensure greater participation of the private sector. The objective of the policy is to use space as a driver of technology development and derived benefits for the economy. The purpose is to create an ecosystem for effective implementation of space applications among all stakeholders and promote greater use of space based data, tools and techniques.

The draft space policy aims to encourage the private sector to establish and operate communication satellites to meet national and international requirements, establish ground facilities for telemetry, tracking and command earth stations and satellite control centres.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with CNBC-TV18, S Somnath, Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said, “The primary goal of these reforms is to enhance the space ecosystem in this country — create a larger space enterprise in this country, where the governmental system and the non-governmental actors to graduate to the next level where we will create an industrial space ecosystem who have an end to end capability.”

He said primary goal of space policy is to get investment in entities, create business opportunities.

“If we have to enhance to a sensible scale in the future, the only way is to create investments from private entities in space systems and also to create business opportunities for them, as well as outside. So this is the primary goal," he said.

Pawan Goenka, Chairperson of INSPACe said, “India can become a manufacturing hub for many space objects, such as, satellites payloads. Today, India is not exporting any satellites or payloads, it's all being made only for our own consumption. Now, today, we have infrastructure in Sriharikota, which is a very good infrastructure, can we expand that infrastructure and become a launch spaceport as we call it for the world."

He added, “We are so far by and large, ISRO dominated application of space objects and space downstream, and we need to get private sector in and that is the real primary role of INSPACe.”

On regulations Somnath said, “I believe that the regulation is necessary because of various international obligations and also, the requirement of ensuring safety of various systems. But we are not going to become ... a hindrance for anybody to work on innovative technologies developed their systems and bring it up to a level where regulation requirements will be addressed.”

Goenka said, “We will be coming out with a guideline just about the same time that policy comes out to describe in detail how INSPACe will function. INSPACe is supposed to be a single-window mechanism to enable space activities by private sector. We are taking inputs from the industry at every step to ensure that what we come out with makes meet the dual purpose of ensuring that we do not compromise with safety security.”

Somnath believes that government will do the necessary groundwork to get the space policy released soon.