Who Constructs India's Rocket: One Unanswered Letter

The dispute inside ISRO does not actually revolve around the issue of allowing Indian firms to manufacture rockets. That question was settled years ago. The harder one is how much knowledge accumulated over six decades by the nation should remain with the people, and who will decide that. “The rockets have left the ISRO workshops, but the guidelines for the transfer have not been framed yet”.

Illustration by The Geostrata

On 4 September, GSLV-F17 placed the EOS-05 satellite in orbit after a gap of nearly eight months. The same date appears on a letter that nine ISRO employee associations sent to Chairman V Narayanan. But on paper, it was a small document. It just needed an explanation in writing, a meeting, and a guarantee that no irreversible step would be taken without informing the staff.

This confusion started when the head of IN-SPACe, a government body set up to approve and promote private activity for space in India, commented. Speaking at a public gathering earlier, the Chairman of IN-SPACe had commented that there will come a time when ISRO will no longer manufacture launch vehicles and other private and public companies will do so instead. It was very natural for them to be curious about something, and that was whether this was really the policy of IN-SPACe.

WHAT THE EMPLOYEES ACTUALLY ASKED

The associations said plainly that they were not against Indian industry nor against commercial work through NewSpace India Limited(NSIL). Their objection was to a policy that nobody had written down yet. ISRO Chairman V Narayanan himself has said that around 80 percent of the budget for PSLV and GSLV missions already goes to Indian industry. The figure makes one thing clear: India's space programme was never really built by ISRO on its own, since it has leaned on private partners from the start. Private participation, they argued, can coexist with a strong public ISRO. What they could not accept without debate was a "residual R&D boutique" while the country's rockets and launch complexes passed into other hands.

The questions they have raised are mostly practical ones. For a start, they wanted to know what would happen to the sanctioned posts and whether regular hiring would carry on over the next five to ten years. Many of them feared that recruitment would slow down if less work stayed inside ISRO. They also worried about the engineers who work at the development facilities, because if private contractors were to take up similar jobs, those engineers might be left without much meaningful work to do. Apart from employment, another bigger worry was that of quality and safety, as design, integration, testing, and launch operations were not going to be performed in one place anymore, and the unions were not sure about who was going to be accountable for these aspects.

THE GOVERNMENT'S ANSWER

ISRO has responded to the privatization reports as baseless. It called the privatization reports "completely baseless and incorrect" and said it would neither be privatized nor diminished.

Dr. Pavan Goenka, Chairman, INSPACe, has echoed this by describing ISRO as the bedrock of the sector and listing what it will keep leading, including the Bharatiya Antariksh Station by 2035, a crewed Indian mission to the Moon by 2040 and next-generation launch systems.

Yet, the same statement also carries a second sentence, and it is worth reading carefully. In it, ISRO said that production of mature launch vehicles, routine satellites and other established systems could be taken up more and more by industry or public sector companies as long as this happens through competitive processes. That is not privatizing ISRO. It is, however, an admission of something real, which is that as time goes on, rockets that have already proved themselves in the field will end up being built elsewhere, like outside the very workshop where ISRO first designed and tested them.

THE HANDOVER HAS ALREADY BEGUN

None of this is hypothetical, since the first handover has already taken place. In June 2025, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited won the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle contract with a bid of ₹511 crore, ahead of consortia led by Alpha Design Technologies and Bharat Dynamics. The agreement was signed in September of that year. During the first two years, HAL has to follow ISRO's design, but after that it may change the rocket and bring in its own suppliers. As far as reports go, it was the first time ISRO had given a complete launch vehicle to a company.

HAL, it should be remembered that it is owned by the state, which makes the word "privatization" a rather poor fit for what is happening. The associations seem to have noticed this too, which is probably why their questions aimed specifically at the LMV3. The expression of interest for LVM3 has also been given out by INSPACe. It was fair questions to raise, since PSLV already involves a consortium of  HAL and L&T for its serial production, so the LVM3 was the one case where that logic seemed not to apply.

The motive, when you look at it closely, is mostly arithmetic. India wants a larger share of a space economy that it expects to reach $44 billion by 2033, and officials talk of one launch every fortnight, which ISRO alone can hardly manage. That is why start-ups are being invited in. One of the examples is Skyroot Aerospace, founded by two former ISRO scientists, have already reached orbit with Vikram-1 in July, thus making India only the third country with a private orbital launch.

ADMIRED ABROAD, UNEASY AT HOME

Around the same time, NASA has openly acknowledged and admired ISRO's growing capabilities in science missions and human spaceflight, which was "incredible to watch." He was speaking about partnership, not privatization, but the remark shows what is at stake. What NASA admires is not a rocket. It is an institution that learned, failed, repaired and learned again.

There is also a fair case to be made on the other side. Repeating the same build is hardly the best use of first-rate engineers, and an agency that makes every rocket on its own is likely to move slowly. But the tough challenge lies in something which people often call tacit knowledge, which is the understanding an engineer builds only after years of working on a specific niche technology. It shows up in knowing why a certain weld tends to fail or sensing that a reading which looks perfectly normal is actually a warning sign. No contact can really spell this out, since the engineer who has it often cannot fully explain it either.

What the associations have asked for is, in truth, not very much. They want a written policy, a proper consultation, and a clear line between what counts as mature technology and what counts as core. Whereas it sounds like an open, clear roadmap that shows which systems are meant to move to industry and by when, and which ones will always stay with ISRO.

It should also protect its own ability to design and test its own rockets because an agency that has forgotten how to build one cannot judge whether someone else has built it well. India has played the space game patiently for six decades, and it would be a pity to rush on the next chapter. If the dream belongs to everyone, then it should be reshaped so that everyone can see it.

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BY SHOUNAK MAJUMDER TEAM GEOSTRATA info@thegeostrata.com