ISRO Opens Up Its Facilities For Testing Satellites Developed By Private Sector For The First Time In 50 Years

In a big boost to India's space sector, for the first time in 50 years, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has opened up its facilities to the private sector with two satellites from the private sector and one from the academia being tested at the Bengaluru based UR Rao Satellite Centre (URSC) of the nation's apex space research body, reports Times of India.

The satellites which are being tested at URSC have been developed by Tamil Nadu based Space Kidz India and Bengaluru based Syzygy Space technologies. Other than this, as per ISRO's chief Dr K Sivan, ISRO is also helping correct the UNITYsat which had problems with its separation system.

UNITYsat is a combination of three satellites which have been designed and built by Sriperumbudur based Jeppiaar Institute of Technology, Coimbatore based Sri Shakthi Institute of Engineering and Technology and Nagpur based GH Raisoni College of Engineering.

Furthermore, over the next few months, Hyderabad based Skyroot Aerospace and Chennai based Agnikul Cosmos will also be testing their engines at Sriharikota spaceport and the Thiruvananthapuram based rocket centres respectively.

ISRO will soon also begin to give its satellite images to MapmyIndia which offers mapping services. In total, ISRO has received as many as 26 proposals, including from United States (US) based Amazon Web Services and from OneWeb which is a United Kingdom (UK) based entity backed by Sunil Mittal who leads telecom major Bharti Airtel.

The proposals are being reviewed by the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre.