Space Startups' Great Gig in the Sky

Once questioned about their prospects, India's space startups stand to bag commercial contracts from around the world

- Shouvik Das

nirudh Sharma, chief executive of space startup Digantara, is setting up a satellite manufacturing assembly line at his company's Bengaluru headquarters. It's a bit of a departure from Digantara's original premise of selling 'space situational awareness'—a map for satellites to navigate increasingly crowded orbits.

So, why is a company looking to sell satellite data to clients setting up an assembly line? Sharma says the decision was driven by the increasing interest over approximately the past six months from governments around the world to source their own space defence and surveillance infrastructure.

Once a practically non-existent sector, space-based defence services, led by the demand for surveillance in the sky, is having a big impact on India. The country's space companies—once heavily questioned about their commercial prospects—now stand on the precipice of bagging contracts from countries around the world.

Aside from Digantara, Bengaluru-based startups GalaxEye, Bellatrix Aerospace and Pixxel, and Hyderabad-headquartered legacy company Ananth Technologies, are all benefiting from this shift. Looking to get in on the action, last December, industrial conglomerate JSW Group entered the field, partnering with $3.5-billion US aerospace and defence-tech company, Shield AI.

As a consequence, India is quietly seeing the genesis of a sector that could give the country immense geopolitical soft power—akin to what Russia and France had previously wielded, in the global space race. At the heart are commercial contracts for manufacturing satellites, and for offering surveillance-related space data services to governments around the world.