The future is SpaceTech

Space technology or SpaceTech shows tremendous promise. While critics point to the fact that most of space’s glory days are in the past—walking on the moon, the space shuttle, and the space station—the truth is that due to high costs and public’s apprehension due to that, space programmes have been considerably scaled down. The golden age of space lasted from the 1960s to the 1990s.

There is a revival now thanks to two things. One is research on the latest cutting-edge technology. Second is low-cost space programs. Only two players seem to be leading on this front: The Indian government organization ISRO and the private American company SpaceX. These two have shown the way for the rest of the world.

ISRO is a great inspiration

Starlink is a satellite-based internet service that crossed coverage to 50 countries some time back and has 5000 satellites. They plan to launch 40K+ satellites which is many times the number of active satellites in the pre-Starlink era. Airtel-OneWeb is planning to compete with them.

The next step is the moon and Chandrayaan-3 made great strides by being the first to land near the Lunar south pole. This is a great breakthrough in future missions, some of which could also be related to human habitations on the moon. What follows is the NASA Artemis mission and 4G Internet service for the moon. India on its part has joined the Artemis Accords.

Elon Musk has great plans for landing on Mars and building human habitation there. For the first time humanity seems to have a plan for space exploration. A low earth orbital system, manned habitations on the moon followed by Mars. An inter-planetaryInternet protocol called Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN)is being developed.

While Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic are seen as billionaire vanity projects by many, they will nevertheless go a long way in promoting humanity’s space ambitions.

For their part, both the government and ISRO are trying their best to promote SpaceTech startups in India, which are 150+ as of now, while the total number of space-related companies are 400+ even as it has quietly become a multi-billion-dollar industry. The Indian Space Policy of 2023 will go a long way in boosting that number.

In the US SpaceX has inspired NASA, which is also looking at low cost SpaceTech. In India it’s the other way round where ISRO is inspiring hundreds of entrepreneurs. Russia has been strapped for cash since the collapse of the USSR and China is looking to outdo them all. Either way, the future is bright, and one hopes Earth enters a golden age of collaboration to conquer new frontiers in space.