India’s goal to achieve 10% of global space market next 10 years not easy task: Ex-ISRO chief S Somanath

Hyderabad: India's ambitious goal of achieving 10 per cent ($50 billion) of the space economy in the next 10 years is not an easy task, primarily because the knowledge in this domain is very complex, former ISRO chief S Somanath said on Friday.

Delivering an address during the graduation ceremony of the Indian School of Business (ISB) here, he also said a recent study by a consultant indicated that ISRO has a return on investment of Rs 2.54 on every rupee spent during the past 60 years.

"It shows us hope that it is possible to create a very vibrant space economy in India as well. At least a possibility of reaching that 10 per cent- $50 billion share of the global space market, but this is not an easy task at all for us primarily because the knowledge in this domain is very complex and it comes out of years of experience," he said.

He further said the complexity of rocket and related engineering remains the same and the possibility of failure is still looming large on companies who want to invest and create space programmes.

He said India currently has 250 startups working in the space sector.

According to him, 60-70 per cent of the revenue comes out of the space application sector, around 20 per cent from the building of satellites and operations and around 15 per cent from building rockets and the required launch infrastructure.

"So the sector has the highest investment requirement and has a long gestation period. The return on investment is actually very low in building rockets. It is moderate in building satellites and it's very high in building the applications," he said.

He said the space sector has been changing dramatically in recent times, primarily coming from the activities happening in the US and the Chinese space programmes and the number of launches in the last few years increased dramatically.

Somanath said India currently contributes only two per cent to the global space economy, which is valued at $500 billion.

"But for a nation that we claim to be at the top of space programme after the last 60 years of work, I think this is not a respectable number. So one of the goals that we have set for ourselves is that we must reach something like 10 per cent of the global space economy, something like $45 to 50 billion in the next 10 years or so," he opined.

The former ISRO chief said every year there used to be typically 100 launches globally and the last year witnessed 290, USA, China and many other nations combined. During the last two to three years, there were 5,000 satellites launched in space globally.