Why America Needs India's Rockets (bloomberg.com)

Since 2005, U.S. satellite manufacturers have been prohibited from hiring India's space agency to launch their equipment. Private American launch companies, such as SpaceX, are quite happy with this arrangement, which was intended to protect them. But the ban is not only wrong in principle -- it's actually impeding an exciting new American industry, according to Bloomberg. From the article: Last month, under pressure from satellite operators and manufacturers, U.S. trade officials began reviewing the decade-old policy. They should heed the pressure and overturn it. Emerging India may seem like an unlikely competitor for Silicon Valley rocket companies. Yet since 1969, the Indian Space Research Organization has consistently punched above its modest weight class, racking up a series of cheap and practical achievements. One of its most important feats was the development of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, which was designed to carry satellites for monitoring agriculture and water resources, among other things. What made the PSLV unique was that it was designed to launch small satellites. And that's a good niche to occupy at the moment. Over the past few years, the small-satellite market has boomed as advances in miniaturization made space accessible to governments and companies that might never have considered it. The uses for such gear seem almost limitless, from shoebox-sized climate-monitoring devices to Samsung's plan to use thousands of micro-satellites to provide global internet access. Some $2.5 billion has been invested in the industry over the past decade. But getting all those satellites into space is now proving to be a problem, and U.S. policy is partly to blame.The article adds that apart from SpaceX, no other U.S. company has offered a rocket for small satellite launches, even though the demand has surged. This in turn, has resulted in American satellite companies with few choices. Though the U.S. Trade Representatives has offered occasional waivers from the moratorium, India continues to offer a far cheaper reliable option, and it's not even being considered.

To offer more context, India's Mars mission has a budget of $73 million -- making it far cheaper than comparable missions including NASA's $671 million Maven satellite. Further reading on Vox.com, "India's mission to Mars cost less than the movie Gravity."

Comments

First Kwik-E-Mart on Mars...

[cayenne8]

Thank you...come again!!

BS

[RightwingNutjob]

Orbital Sciences has been launching small satellites for ages. There, I didn't even have to search the web to come up with a counterexample.

The Indian Mars mission was tiny, about a quarter of the size and weight of the MAVEN, with about 1/4 of the science payload. Hence, 1/4 the cost. If they tried to build an American-sized scientific satellite, with all the same capabilities, they'd cost as much as we do. Just like the Russians and the Chinese cost about as much as we do. Some things take up size and require power and can't be done with small sats. Incidentally, our small sats cost about as much as theirs do.

More propaganda out of msmash about Indian supremacy. Kudos on not having blatant misspellings this time.

Re:BS

[ghoul]

For the level of GDP/capita India has India produces far more scientists and Engineers than other countries. Thats the punching above their weight I am referring to. As for the poverty its a fact that India does not have significant levels of Oil.
The Richest countries in the world have become rich by industrializing on top of cheap Energy. UK,France,Germany did it with Coal. US,USSR,China did it with Oil . Even today the top 5 oil producers in the world are USA,Russia,China,Saudi,Iran with USA and China still needing to import but the abundance of cheap energy makes it easy to become rich. USA in the 20s was the Saudis of the 80s. People who got off the farm and came to the city because suddenly their was a lot of oil.

Japan realized this trap and went for resource colonization of Korea and China to build up their industrial base. India on the other hand just got independent 70 years back after 200 years of colonization during which the Industrial revolution was forbidden by law. It missed the coal based industrialization and had no oil. India has Coal and could industrialize based on Coal but now the Global Warming laws are holding it back just like the British laws favoring British goods over Indian goods during colonization.

I'm not surprised they're cheaper

[rsilvergun]

India has a massive and largely abandoned underclass combined with lax environmental laws (and we're not talking the 'save the whales' kind we're talking the cancer villages kind). I don't expect our want American businesses to compete with that. You'll notice we're not blocking German rocket launches..

Re:I'm not surprised they're cheaper

[ghoul]

Lets Disband NASA till we can have Lead free water in Flint, working levees in New Orleans or paid maternity leave for mothers (which India has BTW).

Just because a nation has problems doesn't mean it shouldn't work on other things. A nation is a huge entity and can work on solving multiple problems at multiple levels.

Yes their are parts of India less developed than parts of India. There are also parts of India more developed than parts of US (Delhi vs a coal mining town in Kentucky)

Do you expect all the highly educated kids whose dream is to work on rockets to go clean toilets in villages till everyone has a working toilet? People have dreams and aspirations based upon their capability and education. Ignoring Space science would mean your best and brightest would just go work for NASA (as it is NASA wouldnt survive without the constant import of brainpower from India).

At least India doesnt spend 600 Billion on defense. India's spending on defense is less than its spending on education. Not something you can say for the US.

Its easy to judge when you have an entire almost empty continent full of natural resources to exploit instead of a country where all the easily reachable resources have been exploited in the last 4000 years and almost every part is inhabited (there is lterally no virgin wilderness in India which does slow down development whenever you want to build a road or a dam as someone lives EVERYWHERE)

money can be exchanged for goods and services

[Pseudonymous Powers]

From the article:

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's administration sought to protect nascent private launch companies from subsidized foreign competition by setting up Commercial Space Launch Agreements. The idea was simple: In exchange for the chance to put U.S. satellites into space, foreign governments agreed to launch quotas and set fees. Both China and Russia signed such agreements. In 2005, India was asked to do the same. While the U.S. waited for an answer (it was and continues to be "no"), it imposed an export moratorium on satellites for Indian launch.

So it sounds like it was a trade deal that fell through. Like, the U.S. offered India the same terms as China and Russia, but they weren't interested. If that's indeed the case, well, China and Russia aren't really known for their laid-back attitude toward these things, so if India's requirements are even more stringent then perhaps we shouldn't be in business with them anyway.

Mind you, I don't know anything about the specifics. Can anyone provide more background on this?

What is "small"?

[legRoom]

...from shoebox-sized climate-monitoring devices to Samsung's plan to use thousands of micro-satellites to provide global internet access.

Those are both way smaller than the PSLV's LEO payload capacity of 3.8 tons, or even its GTO payload capacity of 1.4 tons. Even a shoebox-sized gold brick (~250 kg) doesn't weight nearly that much.

So, the PSLV has the same fundamental problem for such missions as U.S. commercial launchers: it's too expensive to launch tiny satellites one at a time on a huge rocket, which means they have to be launched in batches. But, satellites launched in batches are all deposited in the same orbital plane. That's problematic because different missions require different orbital planes, and making large plane changes after achieving orbit is very, very expensive - especially in LEO.

So, I'm not sure what problem the author thinks the PSLV solves for people launching micro-satellites - it's actually sized for launching medium or mini satellites.

Uninformed fools.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever wrote this knows nothing about rocketry. India's space program is largely based around UMDH and RFNA powered rockets. While there are definite use cases for hypergolic rocket systems, for example ease/reliablilty of start/restart and long term storage (re: ICBM), they are very expensive compared to RP-1/LOX or NH4/LOX based systems and require larger rockets, both due to lower energy density of the fuel/oxider and extra mass to accommodate the very material incompatible nature of UMDH & RFNA.

India chose the "cheap" route just as China did with their space program. Cheap with respect to the fact they can very easily stand on the shoulders of those that came before without having to spend significant R&D cycles developing reliable and more efficient cryogenic pumping systems like the Russians (gas generator) or US (staged combustion) did.

Race to the Bottom [Re:I'm not surprised they're c

[Tablizer]

The 1% constantly sells the idea, directly or indirectly, that we have to become more like the 3rd world to compete with the 3rd world.

We'd have to relax our environmental, labor, and safety laws to achieve this.

If you bring this up with the 1%, they'll typically reply that our pollution rules are written by "paranoid meddlers using fake science" and that long hours should be a choice an individual can make. During recessions it becomes work-long-hours-or-get-fired, though.

I believe we should try the opposite: tell the 3rd world we'll tariff their products unless they conform to certain standards. If enough countries do this, they will change and modernize. Without pressure, they won't change; it's human nature.

And don't claim they have to be export-driven to grow. There's no Law of Economics that says that; it's merely a copy-cat habit that we help feed by giving in. Unleash consumers, not just factories, and your econ will grow.

You got Russia and the US backwards.

[cbhacking]

Um... where the hell did you get the idea that the Russians use gas generators (inefficient) and the US uses staged combustion? That is almost perfectly backward.

Staged combustion was invented by a Russian, Aleksei Mihailovich Isaev.
The first staged combustion rocket engine built was the Soviet S1.5400, first flown in 1960.
The (ill-fated) Soviet N1 moon rocket used staged-combustion NK-15 and NK-33 rocket engines (the American Saturn V moon rocket used gas generator rocket engines).
The first western (German, not US) staged combustion engine was in 1963, and it was a laboratory test only.
The Russian Proton rocket family was using the staged combustion RD-253 rocket engine in 1965.
The US buys staged combustion RD-180 engines from Russia for United Launch Alliance's workhorse Atlas rocket family.

As far as I can tell, the first US-built staged combustion rocket to fly was the RS-25, better known as the SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine), which first flew in 1981. It was a fuel-rich staged combustion cycle, made possible by the use of non-coking H2 fuel. However, by that point the Russians had been using oxidizer-rich staged combustion (which requires advanced metallurgy that the US could not duplicate for over two decades.

Now, both SpaceX and Blue Origin are US companies working on staged combustion rockets, but those are recent projects. In SpaceX's case, it is a full-flow staged combustion rocket, which is extremely tricky; no FFSC rocket has ever flown, although the Russians built and test-fired the RD-270 in the late 60s. SpaceX's Raptor has successfully fired on a test stand, the first FFSC rocket engine to do so since 1970 and the only US-built one to do so ever. The US (through private contractors Rocketdyne and Aerojet) experimented with FFSC in the "Integrated Powerhead Demonstrator", which wasn't even a full rocket motor; the front-end ("Powerhead") component was tested at full capacity in 2006, but then canceled; no full rocket engine was ever built using that design.

So yeah, the US historically didn't have shit on the Russians when it came to advanced rocket combustion cycles. That may be changing now, but it's driven primarily by private industry.