Vaibhav Gera 🇮🇳

The tweet compresses a long meeting into one funny line. Here is what actually happened. See, a satellite is basically a car with the fuel tank welded shut. It launches with every drop it will ever have, and when that runs out the satellite is dead even if the camera, the radio and the solar panels all still work perfectly. That is the problem the petrol pump line is talking about, and it is one of the biggest unsolved problems in the industry. On Friday, Modi Ji met the founders and CEOs of 20 Indian space startups in Delhi. Twenty companies, one room. What got quoted was the two most cinematic sentences from a session that covered launch vehicles, satellite propulsion, orbital servicing, debris removal, ground stations and agriculture. Take the fuel thing first. Satellites burn fuel constantly. Not to fly forward, but to hold their exact slot in orbit, to correct drift, to dodge debris, and finally to push themselves down to burn up when the mission ends. A communications satellite can have fifteen good years of hardware and only ten years of fuel. Those five wasted years are a multi hundred crore asset floating uselessly. If you can refuel in orbit, two things change. Old satellites get extra life. And new satellites can launch carrying less fuel and more actual equipment, because rocket capacity is measured in kilos and every kilo of propellant you do not have to carry is a kilo of camera or transponder you can carry instead. That is why it is described as a petrol pump. You need a standard docking port, a robotic arm that can find and grab a satellite that was never designed to be grabbed, and a way to transfer propellant in zero gravity where liquid does not sit at the bottom of a tank. Bengaluru based OrbitAID is one of the Indian companies working on exactly this. ISRO's chairman V Narayanan inaugurated their R&D facility in September last year and said ISRO would invite private companies into on-orbit servicing and refuelling. Now the medicines part, which sounds even stranger and is actually the older idea of the two. On Earth, when you try to grow a crystal of a protein, gravity ruins it. Heavier bits sink, convection currents stir the liquid, and you end up with small, messy crystals. In orbit none of that happens. Crystals grow bigger, cleaner and more uniform. Now, to design a drug you need to know the exact three dimensional shape of the protein you are targeting, and you get that shape by firing X rays through a crystal. Better crystal, sharper picture. One large pharma company spent years running crystallisation experiments on the International Space Station for a cancer antibody, because the orbital version behaved differently from anything they could grow in a lab. The Indian startup in that room wants to build small satellites that manufacture pharmaceutical material in orbit and then return it to Earth. That is a hard problem, mostly because coming back down is harder than going up. The rest of the meeting was less quotable but more concrete. Skyroot spoke about its 18 July launch, India's first private orbital rocket putting satellites into orbit, and called it a warm up. The company now runs three factories with the capacity to build one rocket a month, wants to launch monthly by the middle of next year, and eventually weekly. Its Infinity Campus in Hyderabad is 200,000 square feet built for exactly that rate. One company said it had signed eight launch contracts in the month after its launch, most of them from foreign customers. Another is building a global ground station network inside 18 months. Another is putting its technology in front of a million farmers. Another is building a robotic spacecraft to catch dead satellites and pull them out of orbit. For context, India had fewer than 50 space startups five years ago. It has crossed 300 now. Modi Ji also talked about policy consistency. That entrepreneurs will take real risk only if they are confident the rules will not change under them halfway through a seven year build. Anyone who has raised money for hardware in India will tell you that is the entire game. Nobody funds a ten year capital intensive bet in a sector where the licensing regime might flip after the next budget. Now, of course, in-orbit refuelling has been demonstrated a handful of times worldwide and nobody anywhere runs a commercial fuel depot yet. Space pharma is at the stage of returning grams of material, not filling prescriptions. And Skyroot has flown one orbital rocket, not fifty. But every hard technology starts as a sentence that sounds silly in a press release. What is genuinely different is that five years ago an Indian founder saying this in that room would have been describing a fantasy. Now there is a rocket that flew in July, a factory that can build twelve a year, and a regulator saying come in. :)