ROOM
62
Astronautics
Narayan Prasad
Satsearch.co, Delft,
The Netherlands
T
oday, NewSpace companies are springing
up almost on a weekly basis and there is
strong reason to believe that there are
over 1,000 such companies spread around
the world. They are embedding themselves across
the value chain from upstream to downstream,
with each attempting to bring a new layer of
innovation by different methods such as low-cost,
commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), agile-mass
manufacturing, and data fusion combined with
machine learning.
With a possible success rate of five percent in
startups across tech industry, the world could
potentially see a cultural shift in space business
through a community of entrepreneurial space
ventures who target their customers with
global business-to-business and consumer-to-
consumer models.
Most of theNewSpace ventures orient the innovations
they are bringing into space products/services towards
establishing capacities across verticals where there
could be network effects that can be exploited.
India’s blossoming NewSpace movement is slowly beginning to synch with
the firebrand entrepreneurs starting companies around the world and
targeting commercial opportunities for innovative space products/services.
In a global context they are being backed mainly by private risk capital
(mostly venture firms) with an expectation that the innovation pursued by
these entrepreneurs will integrate into the economy here on the Earth,
creating value towards a meaningful exit. Narayan Prasad analyses the
industry trends across the world and looks at how India is jumping onboard.
The first developmental
flight (GSLV MkIII-D1) of
India’s heavy lift launch
vehicle GSLV Mk-III was
successfully conducted on
5 June 2017 from Satish
Dhawan Space Centre
SHAR, Sriharikota, with
the launch of GSAT-19.
India’s dynamic
ecosystem for space
entrepreneurship
There are
new services
emerging
across the
world that
are not
charted into
the current
roadmap of
ISRO
