“Space will epitomise defense…it’s a symbol,” said Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair, the fighter pilot and astronaut who will lead India’s first human space mission likely to take off this year. 

What he essentially meant is that space is becoming a symbol of military and economic security. 

Nair wasn’t being carried away when, standing against an evocative background image of a manned manoeuvre in space, he spoke of “art”, “beauty”, and “gut feel” in space endeavours. At a deep-science forum organised by Ankur Capital in Bengaluru, he was addressing a roomful of founders, investors, mentors, and entrepreneurs-in-stealth

In a span of one week, India’s global benchmark-holder rocket PSLV has failed, the second time in eight months. The protesters in Iran got a lifeline in Starlink’s satellite internet but the Iranian regime is using jammers and fake GPS to disrupt the US company’s communication services, making a case for how space is the new battlefield. And in the space community back home, there’s a growing concern that the Indian space agency, Isro, is losing its grip even as stakes grow manifold for strategic and commercial success. 

Between just the two failed PSLV launches, some strategic payloads have been lost, including 15 commercial and student payloads on the latest launch. But it’s the partial functioning of the navigation system Navic (India’s GPS, as it were) that rankles most. 

Writing in Hindustan Times, retired Brigadier Anshuman Narang argued:

Incidentally, Isro has disappointed everyone by not releasing its findings from the July 2025 PSLV-C61 failure; it also evaded questions when the launch failed last week. With 60 successful launches out of 65 till date, PSLV still has a great record but it’s the trajectory of Isro’s overall performance that is coming into question now. 

Fortunately, there’s another trajectory that’s looking good—of the fledgling private space sector in India. It reached a milestone of sorts in 2025 with over 300 active startups, some of which moved from demonstration to deployment. 

Even if Isro takes time to get its act together and recover from its successive failures, its support to the private industry, via In-space (Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre), will remain unwavering.