India set to touch 328 foreign satellite launches on Saturday
- IBEF
- November 9, 2020
On Friday afternoon, the 26-hour countdown to the Saturday rocket launch from the first launch pad will begin. On November 7, 2020, at 3.02 p.m. the rocket with 10 satellites is scheduled to take off from the Sriharikota Rocket Terminal, a senior official of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) told IANS.
The nine overseas satellites are from: Lithuania (1-technology demonstrator), Luxembourg (4 Kleos Space maritime application satellites) and the USA (4-Lemur remote sensing multi-mission satellites).
It all began in 1999 when, for the first time, India launched foreign satellites — Kitsat-3 from South Korea weighing 107 kg and DLR-Tubsat from Germany weighing 45 kg — as piggyback luggage with a PSLV-C2 rocket on the country's own 1,050 kg Oceansat. Since then, 319 foreign satellites have been launched by India over the next two decades.
The ISRO has also set a global record for the largest number of satellites to be launched—104 of which were 101 foreign satellites in a single PSLV rocket on February 15, 2017. ISRO has earned Rs. 1,245.17 crore (US$ 168.25 million) in the last five years by launching satellites from 26 countries, according to the Indian government. The income was Rs. 324.19 crore (US$ 43.81 million) in 2018-19, against Rs. 232.56 crore (US$ 31.42 million) in 2017-18.
Mr. Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State in the Department of Space and the Department of Atomic Energy, told Rajya Sabha in December 2019, “In the last five years, contracts with 10 countries, such as the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, Singapore, Netherlands, Japan, Malaysia, Algeria and France, have been signed under commercial arrangements.”
Two start-ups, Skyroot Aerospace and Agnikul Cosmos Pvt Ltd, are also in the process of developing small rockets while ISRO is building a small rocket with a long winding name — Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) to launch satellites weighing up to 500.
The largest factor in the global space sector will be the launch of small satellites, as ~7,000 satellites are expected to be in the skies by 2027. The focus of global satellite communications will now be the low-cost launch of Smallsats to LEO. In all, at a total cost of $38 billion, about 7,000 smallsats are expected to be launched between 2018 and 2027.
The planned launch of the Saturday rocket will be the first space mission from India for ISRO in 2020.
Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.
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