Author: Chaitanya Giri

Interstellar is in the business of serious news. We are attempting to raise a space sector news and analyses media portal, reasonably technical, at a time when only a few exist in India. We are not here to engage with PR contractors wanting to make celebrities out of entrepreneurs – certainly not the 30 under 30 and 100 under 100 kind. We are more interested in their products and services, their impact on the newly commercialised Indian space ecosystem, and what strategic benefits they bring to India. While working on this daunting task, we often encounter acerbically and stupidly frivolous…

A day before the eager launch of Chandrayaan-3 in India, a piece of massive news broke out in the US. The US Senate Sub-Committee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies has scathingly reduced the NASA budget for Mars Sample Return (MSR), the next crucial step in understanding the Red Planet. Of the NASA ask for 949 million dollars for MSR for 2024, the Sub-Committee has only offered 300 million dollars, threatening to take that away too. To give a perspective, NASA’s first attempt at bringing Martian soil and rocks back to Earth is currently pegged at 10 billion dollars.…

Finally, India signed the US-initiated Artemis Accords this week not to enter any coveted club but to ensure it gains strategic returns through multilateral partnerships. Please don’t question why India chose the US over Russia, why India is picking sides, or whether New Delhi is giving away its strategic autonomy in space. These questions do not matter if one realises India has become hard-headed and resolute about its interplanetary ambitions, the next natural step to its own Gaganyaan & Chandrayaan efforts. There were always strong opinions among those advocating for and against India signing the Artemis Accords. I, for one,…

A piece of big news broke on the internet in the first week of May 2023. The tracking radars of the global ground-based space situational awareness (SSA) company, LeoLabs, detected a Chinese spy spaceplane carrying out extraordinary manoeuvrers and sorties in the Earth’s orbits. The capability to operate such spaceplanes perhaps is limited to only two countries – the US and China, which do not really share cordial relations, thereby making such spaceplane sorties and manoeuvrers mistrustful. According to LeoLabs, the spaceplane has shown capabilities of in-orbit propulsion, change in altitudes, formation flying with an accompanying smaller spacecraft and docking…

Please do not go by the title of this essay. Non-physicists can read it, too, because it is written by one. Last week, I was at an event known as the DEFSAT Conference. It came in the backdrop of another event known as the Defence Space Conclave. Two different space industry bodies, SIA-India and ISpA, organised these events. The best aspect of the theme of these two gatherings was that no one was discussing the elusive peace, but everyone was discussing wars and conflicts. As often said, it is better to prepare for war to ensure stability; some deliberations revolved…

The Indian Space Research Organization took onto its outreach team to unveil the first-ever public release of the Indian Space Policy. It is the first ever for the very reason that in the past sixty years, the Indian government had never articulated and publicised its policy for outer space in one single document. Today with scores of stakeholders multiplying outside the realms of the government, it has become indispensable to coherently put out what the Indian government has mandated itself with when it comes to enhancing the nation’s footprint in outer space. As we at Interstellar had written, this may…

For all these decades, sitting neatly within the Prime Minister’s Office, the Indian Space Program was the government’s strategic undertaking. Directions from the top, funding from the top, participation of a few from the governmental agencies and institutions, and execution to suit the nation’s priorities. However, the process happened in hush-hush, within gated and guarded properties. Indeed, ISRO was pursuing a socio-economic space program, which it always clearly stated. But deep within was the fact that space technologies are inherently dual-use in nature, not just in India but the world over. The gated and guarded properties were not solitary operators.…

A praiseworthy article on the successful Landing Experiment (LEX) of the Reusable Launch Vehicle Tech Demonstrator yesterday, 2nd April 2023, will not fully express the greatness of what has transpired. Putting together in perspective the earlier Hypersonic Experiment (HEX) of 2016, and the recent LEX, India has demonstrated that it can launch a fixed-wing space drone to a suborbital altitude of 65 km, making it attain hypersonic speeds up to Mach 5 and eventually decelerate to subsonic speeds and make a controlled landing on an airstrip. ISRO Chairman Dr Somanath has already confirmed that after a few more rounds of…

Our India, the mother of democracy, is one of the most vibrant ecosystems for journalism. Since the economic liberalization in 1991 we have tightly hugged commercial media, print or audiovisual. One of the world’s largest readerships and viewership resides here, and the content spans genres unimaginable elsewhere. Indian industry and trade journalism are also booming, with sharply delineated readers and viewers having solid preferences based on their expertise and deep informal interests. Automotive journalism is one such vibrant media niche with more informal patrons than formal ones. Any industry and trade media house massively backed by informed informal patrons is…

The New Space India Limited (NSIL) has once again stamped its signature on the deployment of perhaps the world’s second satellite communication constellation with global coverage – OneWeb. NSIL and ISRO can now claim to have launched slightly more than 10% of the satellites launched in the OneWeb constellation, only in two launches, and while competing with the aggressively priced Soyuz-2 and the partially reusable Falcon-9 Block 5. India made a climaxing entry in the lifetime of OneWeb, which came into existence in 2012 by the name of WorldVu Satellites. To put things into perspective, OneWeb had already launched 72…