India's space applications leapfrogged in last 5 decades: ISRO chairman

Dr V Narayanan, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), on Friday said that India’s space programmes had leapfrogged in the last five decades in providing services at grassroots level.

“In the last 50 years, the journey of space programmes in providing applications to the grassroots levels has leapfrogged. Today, we have more than 55 space applications, including television broadcasting, tele medicine, weather forecasting, ensuring food and water security and national security. There was a time when in Odisha we lost 10,000 persons in a natural disaster and today we have come a long way,’ he said at National Space Meet 2.0 here.

Citing an example of ISRO-NASA collaboration on NISAR satellite, Narayanan said that it was the costliest satellite ever made. “This was made by ISRO and launched by our own rocket. We are now checking the data of the satellite. We have successfully conducted the docking experiments — two satellites docked,” he said.

He also recalled that it was the ISRO scientists who detected the leak in the Falcon 9 rocket and ensured the safety of astronauts going for the Axiom-4 mission.