The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is India's national space agency, formed on August 15, 1969, and headquartered in Bengaluru. Built around low-cost, high-reliability missions, ISRO reached Mars orbit on its first attempt with the Mangalyaan probe in 2014,[2] and in August 2023 made India the fourth country to soft-land on the Moon, and the first to do so near the lunar south polar region.[3]

Physicist Vikram Sarabhai led the agency's founding, and it now reports to the Department of Space, developing launch vehicles, satellites, and exploration missions and launching from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the island of Sriharikota. V. Narayanan, a propulsion engineer, became chairman in January 2025. ISRO placed the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter at the Moon in 2008,[1] and is now preparing Gaganyaan, India's first crewed spaceflight program, with an uncrewed test flight targeted for late 2026 and a crewed mission planned for 2027, dates ISRO officials have acknowledged could slip.[4][5]

Status as of August 2026

ISRO has not flown an orbital mission since PSLV-C62 failed on January 12, 2026, its second consecutive PSLV loss; the agency's launch log lists nothing since, and the only orbital success from Sriharikota so far in 2026 has been Skyroot's private Vikram-1 flight on July 18.[28][39][42] Gaganyaan-1, the first uncrewed orbital test, remains unflown: ISRO has continued to describe late 2026 as the goal, but officials suggest the test flights could slip into 2027, with the crewed mission following in 2027 or 2028; the crew module's recovery hardware passed qualification tests in July 2026.[4][5][23] NISAR is in routine science operations, and the first public release of its L-band radar data began on July 20, 2026, covering observations from June 17 onward, with the full record due by the end of 2026.[35][36] Chandrayaan-4, the lunar sample return, holds a landing site atop Mons Mouton and a launch target around 2028,[12] and development of the first Bharatiya Antariksh Station module remains funded through December 2028.[24]

Chandrayaan lunar program

India's Chandrayaan lunar program opened with Chandrayaan-1 (2008), which carried the instrument that helped confirm water molecules in lunar soil.[1] Chandrayaan-2 (2019) delivered a successful orbiter, but its Vikram lander crashed during descent. Chandrayaan-3, launched on an LVM3 rocket on July 14, 2023, corrected the flaws: the Vikram lander touched down at 69 degrees south on August 23, 2023, and deployed the small Pragyan rover.[3][6] The two solar-powered craft operated through one lunar day, measuring surface temperatures, sulfur in the regolith, and seismic activity, and Vikram performed a short propulsive hop before shutting down.[7][8][9]

The landing made India the fourth nation to reach the lunar surface intact, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and China, and the first to land in the south polar region that later missions from several nations now target for water ice.[3] In a bonus demonstration, the mission's propulsion module fired its engines after the surface phase ended and returned from lunar orbit to Earth orbit, rehearsing maneuvers a sample return will need.[9] That follow-on mission, Chandrayaan-4, received Indian cabinet approval in September 2024.[10] It will launch as two spacecraft stacks on two LVM3 rockets, dock in Earth orbit and again in lunar orbit, and aims to bring back two to three kilograms of surface and drilled subsurface samples from near the south pole.[10][11] In February 2026, ISRO identified a flat patch atop Mons Mouton, a mountain about 160 kilometers from the lunar south pole, as the landing site, picked from four candidates imaged by Chandrayaan-2's high-resolution camera; launch is targeted around 2028.[12]

Space science

Aditya-L1, India's first dedicated solar observatory, launched on a PSLV on September 2, 2023, and entered a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L1 point, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, on January 6, 2024.[13] Its seven instruments observe the corona, the solar wind, and solar flares without interruption from eclipses;[14] the spacecraft completed its first 178-day halo orbit in July 2024.[15] Among its early results, the SUIT ultraviolet telescope captured the first images of a solar flare "kernel" in the Sun's lower atmosphere, recorded during an X6.3-class flare in February 2024 and published in early 2025.[16][17] Other science missions include the AstroSat space telescope (2015) and the XPoSat X-ray polarimetry satellite (2024). In January 2025, the SpaDeX experiment made India the fourth country to demonstrate autonomous docking between two spacecraft, a capability required for future station and sample return plans.[18][19] The paired satellites undocked in March 2025 and docked a second time that April, fully autonomously, then transferred power from one craft to the other.[20][21] The next planetary target is Venus: the Venus Orbiter Mission, approved by the cabinet in September 2024 with 19 science payloads, is targeted for a March 2028 launch window.[10]

Gaganyaan and human spaceflight

Gaganyaan, India's first crewed spaceflight program, aims to fly Indian astronauts to low Earth orbit on a human-rated version of the LVM3. A crew escape test, TV-D1, flew in October 2023, and four Indian Air Force pilots, Prasanth Nair, Ajit Krishnan, Angad Pratap, and Shubhanshu Shukla, were introduced as astronaut-designates in February 2024. One of them, Shubhanshu Shukla, flew as pilot on the private Axiom Mission 4 to the International Space Station in June 2025, becoming the first Indian in orbit since Rakesh Sharma in 1984 and giving the program direct spaceflight experience. He spent 18 days aboard the station, completed seven Indian-designed microgravity experiments, and splashed down off the California coast on July 15, 2025.[22]

The first uncrewed orbital test, Gaganyaan-1 (G1), has slipped repeatedly: ISRO targeted December 2025, then moved the flight into 2026, and officials now describe late 2026 as the goal while conceding it could move into 2027.[23][5] Integration of Vyommitra, a humanoid robot that will ride in the crew module and monitor its systems, began in April 2026.[23] Ground qualification has continued through the delays; in July 2026 the crew module's recovery hardware, including the flotation system that rights the capsule after splashdown, passed its tests.[5] Two further uncrewed flights are planned before the crewed H1 mission, which ISRO schedules for early 2027, though a G1 slip would push it toward 2028.[4][5] The government has also approved longer-range goals: a Bharatiya Antariksh Station (Indian space station), whose first module and four technology demonstration missions were funded through December 2028 as part of an expanded Gaganyaan program,[24] a complete station by 2035, and an Indian crewed lunar landing by 2040.[25]

Launch vehicles

ISRO fields four orbital launch vehicles, from the small-satellite SSLV to the LVM3, its heaviest rocket:

RocketFirst orbital flightPayload classRole
PSLV1993About 1,750 kg to Sun-synchronous orbitWorkhorse for Earth observation and small missions
GSLV2001About 2,500 kg to geostationary transfer orbitCryogenic upper stage; launched NISAR
LVM32017About 4,000 kg to GTO, 10,000 kg to LEOHeaviest Indian rocket; Chandrayaan-3 and Gaganyaan
SSLV2022About 500 kg to LEOQuick-turnaround small satellite launcher

ISRO's PSLV has flown 64 missions since 1993 and once deployed 104 satellites on a single 2017 flight, then a world record. Two consecutive failures have interrupted that reliability: the C61 mission, the vehicle's 63rd, was lost in May 2025 when chamber pressure fell in the third-stage motor,[26][27] and the C62 return-to-flight mission failed in January 2026 after a roll disturbance late in the third stage's burn.[28] Before these, the PSLV had not failed since 2017.[27]

The LVM3 (formerly GSLV Mk III) is central to current plans: it launched Chandrayaan-3, carried 72 OneWeb broadband satellites across two commercial missions in 2022-2023, and is being human-rated for Gaganyaan. In late 2025 it flew twice in under eight weeks, first with CMS-03, a 4,400-kilogram naval communications satellite that was the heaviest Indian communications satellite yet sent toward geostationary orbit,[29] then with BlueBird 6, a roughly 6,000-kilogram commercial direct-to-smartphone satellite for the American operator AST SpaceMobile and the heaviest payload the rocket has placed in low Earth orbit.[30] The GSLV opened 2025 by flying the NVS-02 navigation satellite on the 100th launch from Sriharikota.[31]

For heavier loads, the September 2024 cabinet decisions funded the Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV), designed to lift three times the LVM3's payload at 1.5 times the cost, with reusable components and three development flights planned.[24] A second spaceport at Kulasekarapattinam, in Tamil Nadu, is under construction for small launch vehicles; ISRO expects the complex to be ready by December 2026.[32]

Orbital launches since the start of 2025:

DateMissionPayloadResult
January 29, 2025GSLV-F15NVS-02 navigation satelliteSuccess; 100th launch from Sriharikota[31]
May 18, 2025PSLV-C61EOS-09 imaging satelliteFailure in the third stage[26]
July 30, 2025GSLV-F16NISARSuccess[33]
November 2, 2025LVM3-M5CMS-03 communications satelliteSuccess[29]
December 24, 2025LVM3-M6BlueBird 6 (commercial)Success[30]
January 12, 2026PSLV-C62EOS-N1 and rideshare payloadsFailure in the third stage[28]

NISAR and international cooperation

NISAR, the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite, launched on a GSLV on July 30, 2025, into a 747-kilometer polar orbit, the first GSLV mission to a Sun-synchronous orbit. The jointly built observatory carries L-band and S-band radars that can detect centimeter-scale movement of land and ice worldwide, supporting studies of earthquakes, glaciers, and ecosystems. It is the largest space hardware collaboration to date between NASA and ISRO.[33] The satellite returned its first radar images in August 2025,[34] finished commissioning, and entered its science operations phase in early January 2026, imaging nearly all of Earth's land and ice on a 12-day repeat cycle across a three-year baseline mission.[35] The first calibrated L-band data reached the public archive in July 2026 through NASA's Earthdata system.[36]

India signed the Artemis Accords in 2023, and ISRO cooperates with agencies including CNES and JAXA. With JAXA it is preparing the joint Chandrayaan-5/LUPEX lunar polar mission, an ISRO-built lander carrying a JAXA rover to prospect for water ice near the lunar south pole, set to launch on Japan's H3 rocket late this decade; the two agencies signed the mission's implementing arrangement in August 2025.[37][38]

Commercial activities

NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), founded in 2019, is ISRO's commercial arm, selling launches and satellite services and transferring technology to industry; it managed the OneWeb LVM3 missions. The regulator IN-SPACe, created in 2020, licenses a fast-growing private sector that includes startups such as Skyroot Aerospace and Agnikul Cosmos, which have flown India's first private suborbital rockets. That sector reached orbit on July 18, 2026, when Skyroot's Vikram-1 placed two small satellites in a 450-kilometer orbit on its first flight, the first orbital launch by a private Indian company; ISRO cast and tested the rocket's solid motors at its own facilities and hosted the launch at Sriharikota, with IN-SPACe handling clearances.[39][40] India's space budget remains modest by superpower standards, approximately 13,700 crore rupees (about 1.6 billion dollars) for 2026-27, a constraint that has shaped ISRO's cost-conscious engineering culture.[41]

References

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  2. Mars Orbiter Mission - NASA Science.
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  5. India's crewed space mission is ready for splashdown, but not launch - The Register.
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  7. Chandrayaan-3 - The Planetary Society.
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  10. Mission to the Venus, and to the Moon: Configuration and Scientific Objectives - ISRO.
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  15. Aditya-L1 Mission: Completion of First Halo Orbit - ISRO.
  16. Historic First: India's Solar Ultra-violet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) onboard Aditya-L1 Captures Unprecedented Solar Flare Details - ISRO.
  17. Indian spacecraft Aditya-L1 observes massive solar flare - Phys.org.
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  19. SpaDeX docking of SDX-01 and SDX-02, January 16, 2025 - ISRO.
  20. SpaDeX undocking successful - ISRO.
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  27. Indian rocket launch fails, Earth-observation satellite lost - Space.com.
  28. ISRO's first 2026 mission PSLV-C62 fails - Deccan Herald.
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  30. Indian rocket launches AST SpaceMobile's next-gen BlueBird 6 satellite - SpaceNews.
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  40. Skyroot Aerospace reaches orbit on first Vikram-1 launch - SpaceNews.
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  42. Launch Missions - ISRO.