Deep Tech Special: Inside India's space race
The space race is heating up in India, with a bunch of entrepreneurs eyeing the final frontier
Perhaps one feature that fell through the cracks in our recent edition on luxury tourism was space travel. You’d be tempted to ask, ‘But which Indian operator offers this?’ to which the simple answer would be that borders are hardly enough to rein in India’s superrich space enthusiasts. In May, 30-year-old India-born aviator and entrepreneur Gopi Thotakura became part of a global elite set of space tourists on Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin’s rocket called New Shepard.
Orbital and lunar space tourism—missions that orbit the Earth, and the moon and which may eventually even land on it—are still a work in progress. What’s on offer now are suborbital trips to the edge of space from providers like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin.
In April, the United States’ Space Exploration and Research Agency (Sera), which was founded to build a global community dedicated to space exploration, announced a partnership with Blue Origin for a spaceflight programme for citizens of nations that lack space access. Sera’s website points out that over 80 percent of all astronauts have come from just three nations.
Meanwhile, pushing the envelope to the limit is Elon Musk, whose vision is to make humans an interplanetary species by taking them to Mars. Starship, a reusable rocket ship, is an orbital-class vehicle being built to do longer trips, like to the moon and back and, eventually, to the Red Planet. In early June, on its fourth test flight into space, Starship returned successfully to Earth; Musk has hinted of a fifth sojourn in late July.
