With more countries getting involved and costs falling, increasingly ambitious projects are being proposed. What can India do for human space exploration? Owen Bennett Jones interviews Susmita Mohanty (CEO, Earth2Orbit) on BBC’s Newshour Extra.

To listen to the complete episode visit Newshour extra – Reaching for the Stars.

Today 16 Dec. 15, the Indian PSLV C29 rocket carried 6 Singaporean satellites to an equatorial orbit at 6 PM from Sriharikota launch centre. There were a few significant aspects of this launch campaign that are of technical, geo-political and commercial significance.

This was this was the first buy out of an entire rocket by Singapore after their previous launch experience of XSAT as a piggyback on PSLV in 2011. The launch projects the strengthening of interest of regional and international players to confidently procure entire launch vehicle based on their initial experiences.

The occasion is a celebration of the 50^th year anniversary of Singapore (50^th year of international collaboration with India) and incidentally also marks 50^th rocket launched by Indian (including SLV, ASLV, PSLV, GSLV).… Click here to read the complete article

The last week of November 2015 saw the U.S. President Obama sign into law ‘Asteroid Resource Property Rights’ which recognises the right of U.S. citizens to own asteroid resources they obtain and encourages the commercial exploration and utilization of resources from asteroids.[i] This potentially will act as a bouncing board for US companies to add a new dimension to the space economy which is possibly several times bigger than the current ‘earthly’ space business revenues.

Around the same time came an announcement by NASA to the private sector to “take over” Low-Earth orbit with willingness to open up LEO to terrestrial markets.… Click here to read the complete article

More than 50 companies world over are actively investing and lobbying to make commercial spaceflights for tourists a regular feature of the future. Given the limited number of spacefaring nations today, these companies are largely based in the US and Russia, with other stakeholders being Japan, China, Germany and France. So where does India figure in this scenario?

India has proved itself to be an independent space power in the past. ISRO required less investment to send Mangalyaan to Mars, than Hollywood did to make the film Gravity — and that impressively small budget was, to a great extent, attributed to the lower cost of Indian engineering.… Click here to read the complete article