‘Key to space ambitions’: India succeeds in historic space docking mission

New Delhi, India – India on Thursday morning successfully docked one satellite onto another, joining a small group of elite spacefaring nations to have carried out the complex technological feat in zero gravity.

Only the United States, Russia and China have carried out space docking missions, which allow separate satellites to work as a team, coordinating their tasks and sharing resources that can’t be carried on one spacecraft.

The Indian mission, dubbed Space Docking Experiment (SpaDeX), lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in the country’s southern Andhra Pradesh state on December 30, carrying two satellites, called Chaser and Target.

Like India’s previous headline-grabbing space ventures – from landing on a challenging part of the moon to launching a Mars mission – SpaDeX was built and catapulted into space on a shoestring budget.

Space observers and astrophysicists told Al Jazeera that docking expertise was of “critical importance” to India’s space ambitions and upcoming missions. But why is it a big deal?

Where does it place India vis-a-vis space superpowers? And how does India keep its space costs low?

What did SpaDeX do?

Chaser and Target each weigh about 220kg (485lb). After being launched together on December 30, the two satellites separated in space.

They flew 470km (292 miles) above Earth, where they were carefully placed in the same orbit – but about 20km (12 miles) apart. There, they tested a range of manoeuvres to prepare for the docking.

Then, Chaser slowly nudged towards its partner, Target, before they mated in the early hours of Thursday. The docking attempt was earlier scheduled for January 7 but was delayed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) after the drift between the twin satellites was noted to be more.

Celebrations broke out at the ISRO headquarters while Prime Minister Narendra Modi also congratulated the space agency for “the successful demonstration of space docking of satellites”.

Modi described the docking as a “significant stepping stone for India’s ambitious space missions in the years to come”.

Why is the docking significant?

In the run-up to the mission, Jitendra Singh, India’s science and technology minister, said the mission is “vital for India’s future space ambitions”. Singh was referring to an array of projects undertaken by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) that include sending a man to the moon by 2040, building India’s first space station, and sending an orbiter to Venus.

Docking technology will be critical in assembling the space station and in crewed missions, providing crucial facilities including in-orbit refuelling and assembling heavy infrastructure in microgravity.

“ISRO has demonstrated it is good at launching and putting things in orbit, as well as landing,” said astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury, vice-chancellor at Ashoka University on the outskirts of New Delhi. “Now, docking is an important part of upcoming missions – and ISRO is now graduating to a very, very significant level.”

In August 2023, the Indian mission Chandrayaan-3 became the first in the world to land near the moon’s South Pole. Since then, ISRO’s ambitions have only grown. The next phase of the moon mission – Chandrayaan-4 – will involve a capsule that will collect samples from the moon and then dock with a return spacecraft for the trip back to Earth.

“Missions like Chandrayaan-4 are so complicated that they cannot be launched in one piece. It’s too heavy and the pieces need to combine in space before landing on the moon to scoop lunar rocks,” explained Raychaudhury.

Demonstrating its docking abilities also enabled ISRO to offer services to others, Raychaudhury added.

Pallava Bagla, co-author of Reaching for the Stars: India’s Journey to Mars and Beyond, concurred that “ISRO needs to master this tech for future missions.”

A unique addition to the SpaDeX mission is the incorporation of two dozen experiments by nongovernmental entities, including space-tech startups and academic institutions.

“By making this platform accessible [to the private sector], we are reducing entry barriers and enabling a wider range of entities to contribute to the space sector,” said Pawan Goenka, chairman of India’s space regulatory body, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre.

Bagla agreed.

“It’s no longer an Indian government space organisation,” he said of ISRO. “It is now an Indian space ecosystem in which you have the ISRO as the main player that is now hand-holding private start-ups and institutions.”

‘Innovation, not frugality’

While ISRO keeps going for the stars, a report by Tracxn, a market intelligence platform, noted that the funding in India’s private space sector plummeted by 55 percent in 2024 to $59.1mn from $130.2m in 2023, a first fall in the last five years. (Reuters reported that the drop comes amid a global 20 percent decline in space sector investment.)

Meanwhile, government funding for the Indian space agency has soared. After the historic landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the moon and following the launch of a solar probe, Aditya-L1, the Indian government allocated the largest fund ever allocated by the country for future space projects – a kitty of 10 billion rupees ($116 million) – announced in October last year.

However, experts told Al Jazeera that these funds are still minimal given the complexities and ambitions of upcoming projects.

The country’s space agency earlier spent $74m in sending the Mars orbiter and $75m on last year’s Chandrayaan-3. For comparison, NASA’s Mars orbiter cost $582m in 2013 while Russia’s moon mission which crashed two days before Chandrayaan-3’s landing cost $133m. Or take a look at the budget of celebrated space-oriented thrillers like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar ($165m) and Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity ($100m).

But is this a feature or a bug of the Indian space programme?

Mylswamy Annadurai, who worked for 36 years at ISRO and served as the director of its satellite centre, recalled famous photographs of Indian scientists carrying parts of rockets on a bicycle in 1963, before the country’s first rocket launch.

“After completing its vision concerning providing education, healthcare, weather forecast, and monitoring natural disasters, ISRO realized it was time to move ahead to the dreams no one even dared to see,” Annadurai told Al Jazeera, recalling a conversation with APJ Abdul Kalam, a celebrated aerospace scientist and former president of India. “The next generation, we, thought – ‘Why cannot we go beyond?’”

Annadurai went on to lead India’s first deep space mission, Chandrayaan-1, which made the crucial lunar water discovery on the moon – and earned him the title of India’s “Moonman”. He was also tasked with preparing project reports, including budget demands from the government.

“I knew very, very clearly that we cannot ask for a budget [that is] beyond the scope of the government of India. I needed to justify the cost to the policymakers,” he said, explaining the reasoning for spending a fraction of what other space-going nations pump into missions.

“I know my father’s capabilities of funding my higher education,” Annadurai added, laughing. “We also constrained ourselves to make the mission [Chandrayaan-1] possible within that budget [3.8 billion rupees ($44m)] – and that question of ‘how’ paved the way for ingenious ways.”

Here’s how.

“We only made and flew one hardware module, unlike four to five testers by other agencies,” Annadurai said, listing the ways in which India’s space scientists cut costs. “Using modest launch vehicles, ingenious designs, charting longer and slower trips, and using a lesser amount of fuel.”

Then he joked.

“We are second to none in terms of the space programmes but we are second to everybody when it comes to salaries,” Annadurai said, laughing again, “and that’s a reasonably good reason for low costs.”

To Raychaudhury of Ashoka University, “jugaad” (an informal Hindi term meaning an approach to solving a problem using simple resources) is “one of the distinguishing features of the ISRO missions”.

Yet he believes the focus on ISRO’s low-budget successes is also a legacy of the Western media’s historic criticism and mocking of India’s space efforts. In 2014, after India launched the Mars robotic probe, The New York Times published an infamous cartoon depicting a farmer with a cow knocking at the door of a room marked “Elite Space Club”, where well-suited men sit. The cartoon was called out as “racist” and the newspaper apologised after the controversy.

“We keep trying to justify that we are doing it at a low cost. The ISRO has novel approaches and makes sure to use resources in a very frugal way,” Raychaudhury said.

But ISRO should also be getting plaudits for its innovations, he added.

“This fixation on the budget is now becoming a barrier,” Raychaudhury said.

“Innovation should be ISRO’s identity, not frugality.”

Source