India’s spaceports, active, under construction, or proposed

India’s IN-SPACe government agency, tasked with encouraging the development of a commercial space agency to eventually replace its established space agency ISRO, has now put out an “expression of interest”, looking for private companies that might be interested in taking over from ISRO the operation of the new spaceport being built for small rockets near the subcontinent’s southeastern tip.

The new spaceport is near the town of Kulasekarapattinam, as shown on the map to the right, but it appears ISRO also refers to it as either Thoothukudi or the Small Satellite Launch Complex (SLC).

While the ownership of the spaceport will remain with the Department of Space, the selected private entity will be responsible for the operation and upkeep of launch infrastructure, coordination with ISRO/launch providers and execute launch campaigns. [Private] launch providers, such as Skyroot (Vikram-1) and NSIL/HAL (SSLV), who may be interested in launching their rockets from SLC, will serve as customers to this entity to book the pad for their launches.

This is in contrast to the model used by NASA where launch pads are leased out to the launch providers themselves (eg. SpaceX with Pad LC-39A) who act as the exclusive operators of the pad, launching only their own missions from it, and must invest heavily in the maintenance and potential upgrades to the pad.

The American arrangement puts as much infrastructure in the hands and control of the private companies, assuming they will know best how to operate their pads. It is a very effective system. This Indian arrangement, similar to what France’s space agency CNES is doing in French Guiana, centralizes control to the spaceport, and requires different companies to spend more to adapt their rockets to the pad. It is less efficient for the rocket company, but it also requires less investment from them, which at this time might be necessary for these Indian rocket startups.

This plan indicates once again however that it will not be easy for India to transition from the government model to the capitalism model. There are too many vested interests in the government working to protect their turf. They will not let go willingly.