Entrepreneurs of the Mumbai startup dream of space cities, but they also know it starts with one propulsion system, one rig, one sensor suite at a time
Professor Arindrajit Chowdhury at IIT-Bombay and his student Tausif Shaikh, a propulsion systems expert, started Inspecity Space Laboratories only last year. This year, they’re preparing to launch a small CubeSat propulsion system that is about the size of a small tiffin box.
It will take them one small step forward in developing an ecosystem of in-space life extension of satellites, involving repairs, navigations and eventually controlled de-orbiting manoeuvres. The demand for such services is expected to grow to several billions of dollars over the next decade.
The duo is looking to launch the CubeSats both on an Isro platform as well as a standalone satellite. Next, they want to work with a partner satellite operator to test if their module can approach it, rendezvous with it, and perform some proximity operations.
To begin with, “we are not going to do any kind of docking or robotic applications. We are just going to get close, go around, observe, and measure parameters like distance, attitude, the rate of change of attitude and so on”, Chowdhury says.