The current world geoeconomic and geopolitical order, which emerged after the Second World War, is likely heading towards its culmination. This should be known to all, including our Indian scientists, especially those working on crucial scientific programmes. My peers and the past five generations of Indian scientists worked in a very peculiar era that had a steep gradient of capabilities that their laboratories had with respect to the laboratories they visited in the West. That gradient has considerably plateaued; however, east of India has risen a scientific superpower ready to challenge the North Atlantic West. The financially well-off non-Western nations, especially West and Southeast Asia, are beginning to pump money into cutting-edge science. We are not far behind, but the problem here is we are in a precarious situation, and situational awareness should be imparted to scientists, especially those who have the aptitude to create crucial intellectual property that will ensure Bharat the security it needs during the next three-quarters of the 21st century.
Image Courtesy: ISRO
Ambition and caution go hand in hand. If one outplays the other, it leads to no net gain. If both remain proportionately low, it leads to slow gains for our country. If both remain proportionately high, our country will gain fast. It is the fast gain that is needed in the next few years, a brief window of opportunity that is closing fast.
There is no need to elaborate to my learned readers that space activities are considered strategic by the Indian government. It has always been closely guarded, barring occasions when India was keen to reach out to both the Global North and South. Since the 1990s, the Indian space programme has been well integrated with its international peers — the international customers we got for PSLV launches, the international institutions that contributed with payloads for Chandrayaan missions, the tracking support that countries offered whenever an Indian launch vehicle carried spacecraft, the exchange of telecom and geospatial platforms with countries during crises and in needs of socio-economic causes, is testimony to the fact. India did face geopolitical trouble during that period, be it terrorism, economic bankruptcy, unstable national governments, or lack of public infrastructure. But never since the 1990s has the world been on the brink of a major conflict on a worldwide scale.
TECHNOLOGY AND CONFLICT
Five years ago, when I wrote the report ‘A Space Exploration Industry Agenda for India’ for the Indian think-tank Gateway House, I took inspiration from the famed Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev and his technology supercycle concept. His concept, the Kondratiev Wave, to simplistically put, denotes a wave that lasts 40-60 years when a set of technologies emerge (at the middle of the wave’s amplitude), bring in prosperity (as the wave rises to the crest), see fall in the technology’s value (as the wave dips towards the trough), and then see further improvement (as the wave rises from the former trough). I attempted to superimpose the emergence of key sets of technologies, placed them at the crest, and after that, saw their use in subsequent major wars fought. So, for example, when nuclear fission was discovered in the 1930s, it saw immediate utility during the Second World War as nuclear weapons.
Similarly, the discovery of large-scale ammonia production was vital for fertiliser production and the production of explosives used during the Second World War. Very similarly, the technologies today that are the archetypes of the Fourth Industrial Age are most likely to be used in the impending global conflict or be used in certain important war theatres.
I am also of the opinion that the First Space Age was concurrent with the Third Industrial Age, as the world would not have space capabilities without the emergence of plastics, semiconductors and computers. Similarly, we cannot have the Second Space Age without the use of cyber-physical systems, digitisation, and genetic modification, which is necessary for long-duration extraterrestrial human habitation. Where the First Space Age was chronologically simultaneous with the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the India-Pakistan Wars, these wars, along with the First Space Age, were largely dictated by the strategies set for the capitalist-communist Cold War. The Second Space Age, too, will be affected by and simultaneously contribute to the next big conflict or a wave of conflicts fought in different theatres. The bottom line is, God forbid, when the next wave erupts, space technology will be a key instrument of war-fighting, and those involved in making and operating such technologies will be war bounty, exactly the way Soviets and Americans smuggled the German makers of the V2 rockets, after the fall of Nazi Germany, to build their respective space programmes.
SPACE AND GEOPOLITICS
Ten years is a long period in politics. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership has contributed immensely to reshaping the Indian space programme. In the past few years, Bharat opened its space sector, earlier steered by ISRO, for the private sector. The private sector is now beginning to develop commercially viable and saleable space products and services for its markets. It is keen to sell them to friendly customers across the world. Bharat is now confident of looking beyond the remits of businesses and ready to share its knowledge and help economically developing countries aspiring to have their operational assets in space. We said the same during the 2023 G20 Summit in New Delhi. We are ready to partner with the US-led Artemis Accords grouping and the China-Russia-led International Lunar Research Station grouping, both keen to set up communications, cargo and personnel
transportation, and logistics infrastructure between the Earth and the Moon. The Indian space programme is now attuned to the broader global trends in worldwide civilian space activities. But, is the Indian space ecosystem — which includes ISRO, the armed forces operators, and the commercial entities — attuned to make fast-paced manoeuvring that is warranted due to the increasing geopolitical volatility and stresses across the world?
Image Courtesy: NASA
In the past few months, India, which has often professed and acted on maintaining global peace, true to its inherent ethos of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, has been arm-twisted to take sides in an ongoing conflict. Psychological operations have been carried out across social and news media suggesting that countries belonging to certain groupings have decided to withdraw trade of military technologies with India. India, despite maintaining its mature stance that no solution to a conflict can be found on the battlefield, has been continuously asked to play a role in ending the war. The hypocritical task slyly ignores India’s constructive statements and actions and comes across as dictation to toe the line that the collective grouping wants New Delhi to take. Closer to our homeland, India’s neighbourhood is on an explosive powder keg, with many countries staring at internal disturbances, coups and secession. The Arabian Sea is seeing a steep rise in piracy, which itself is a threat to India’s export strategy and the Make in India programme. Furthermore, the cross-cutting economic sanctions, disrupted global supply chains, the decoupling between the US and China, and the rise of multiple geopolitical and geoeconomic poles and conflict hotspots are forcing India to prepare its space programme for a turbulent decade or so.
Image Courtesy: ISRO
The narrative that India’s space programme held up during the transformative years —2014 to 2024 — has lost its shelf life but continues to be practised. The past 10 years saw India sell its space capabilities as part of the Make in India programme. Later, the country’s space industry bodies requested that a special Production Linked Incentive Scheme be developed, which transpired into a new Foreign Direct Investment policy for the space sector. But there is a ravening elephant in the room that no one is interested in pointing out.
Indian scientific planners need to give away their fascination for seeking overseas validation. Yes, we have always continued doing it despite getting Independence in 1947. For those who don’t know, Patrick Blackett, the British Nobel Prize-winning physicist, spent time until 1964 — the year of PM Nehru’s passing away — as a military consultant to the Indian government, as he brought his World War technology development antecedents and experience to the table. Our pursuit of science as a force of good must continue to be protected, and that protection can only come when we do science using our inherent competencies and for securing our strategic interests.
METASTRATEGIC SPACE PROGRAMME AND FDI
India’s space ecosystem, of course, needs a market, but you cannot dominate markets with goods that you do not innovate. Influence from outside does not let one innovate. For instance, Blackett, who was instrumental in selling the Gnat aircraft to India in 1956, was not in favour of Kurt Tank and VM Ghatage indigenously building the Marut supersonic aircraft. In his formal consultations with the Indian government, Blackett suggested keeping the defence budget well within 2% of the national GDP. Many Blackett-like foreign strategic consultants around India are consulting in their capacities, and some are running consulting firms. One of the most significant voids in the understanding of post-independence India’s techno-politics was whether Blackett was an agent of British intelligence or a conduit ensuring the continuity of relations between the British and Indian scientific and political elite even after independence. Seeing the kind of attempts being made that India relinquishes its strategic autonomy, all attempts will be made so that India does not have an ambitious and advanced space programme.
Image Courtesy: ISRO
Such attempts were made in the past, with the episode of India attempting to acquire cryogenic engines from the Soviet Union jeopardised. It can happen again, and the caution is not only for ISRO and its willingness to innovate cutting-edge space technologies but also for the newly emerging national commercial space ecosystem. India’s space ecosystem needs to be protected, firstly from its desire to lift funds from non-vetted financiers. Irrespective of space reforms and encouragement to space sector companies, both the government and the companies must realise that they are trustees of India’s metastrategic space programme. The desire to flaunt the volume of funds raised from overseas financiers needs to go away. Indeed, the government needs to encourage domestic capitalists and financiers, including our banks, to start investing in our ecosystem. Still, it is also necessary for space companies to resist the desire for FDI.
Second, we must ask today: How long do we work for overseas investors and help them make money from our innovation? When do we start making strategic overseas investments? It is not that India will innovate and build everything under the sun. But are we making those strategic investments in foreign companies that are innovating goods of great significance to us? Bharati Global’s investment in the then financially sick satellite internet company, OneWeb, is a rare example to cite. However, it was not a tech-hunting investment as no great technology was transferred from OneWeb to the Indian space ecosystem. The Indian ecosystem needs to identify the technologies and procure them to expand its product portfolio and make profits. Indian space companies should learn to make big profits, and those who do so must learn to protect their intellectual and monetary properties. There is great value attached to such protection, as entities that do not protect themselves not only fail their investors but also cause harmful ramifications for their governmental stakeholders. Multipolarity will exacerbate threats to promising space companies, and they, including their intellectual property, must be protected at all costs.
Image Courtesy: ISRO
BETWEEN AMBITION AND AUTONOMY
Space 2.0 has not begun recently. For Bharat, it began when PSLV began launching internationally sourced satellites, and revenue became a ‘priority’ for the Department of Space. For China, it began in 2000, when the State Council began publishing the White Paper on Space Activities. It began in the US long before the 1984 Commercial Space Launch Act. The hallmark of Space 2.0 is commercialisation, and these commercial entities would work wherever they find business. In peacetime, they will work on peaceful activities, while in times leading to conflict and during conflict, they will follow the lead of military applications. What this also means is it will begin to absorb talent, depending on their timely utility. To put it simply, although Wernher Von Braun, the famed aerospace engineer, wanted to build a rocket to the Moon in the early 1930s, circumstances in Germany led him to join the Nazi Party and build for Germany the world’s first missiles, V2, only to later take the Americans to the Moon with his Saturn V rocket. Apart from protecting financial and intellectual property, India has to protect its human talent; it cannot let it go, jeopardising the strategic advantages that can be derived.
In a globalised world, protection has been a taboo word, especially when India was late to the party in terms of space commercialisation. But it is important to understand that commercialising the space sector means that it retains its strategic pedestal. India has begun commercialising to avoid letting loose intellectual, monetary, and human resources to the world in a superficial manner. The capability has only been diversified, with a delegation of tasks that ISRO handled while tapping into the talent pool that ISRO could not avail of and ensuring that India continues to upkeep its strategic autonomy from ambitious space activities.
Beyond the rhetoric that outer space is a common heritage of humankind and that our nation’s scientific and economic pursuits are for global good, does our space programme ensure that Bharat remains secured from aggressions at our nation’s frontiers and turmoils created by apparent friends and adversaries internally? Does our space programme need to be secured even more? We need to quickly find solutions to these two questions. Time is running out.
*The writer is a Fellow of the Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation in Mumbai. He is a space scientist and has been a co-investigator of ESA’s Rosetta Mission.
