ISRO

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]

Origins#

India's space effort predates ISRO itself. Physicist Vikram Sarabhai persuaded Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to create the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) in 1962, and the program's first flight, a Nike-Apache sounding rocket, lifted off from Thumba on India's southern coast on November 21, 1963.^[43][44] ISRO superseded the committee on August 15, 1969.^[43] The agency's first satellite, Aryabhata, a 360-kilogram platform for X-ray astronomy and solar physics, rode a Soviet Kosmos-3M rocket to orbit on April 19, 1975.^[45] An Indian rocket followed: the SLV-3, a 22-meter, all-solid, four-stage vehicle that could place 40 kilograms in low Earth orbit. Its first attempt in August 1979 was only partially successful, but on July 18, 1980 it delivered the Rohini RS-1 satellite, making India the sixth country to orbit a satellite on its own launcher. Two more SLV-3 flights in 1981 and 1983 carried small remote sensing payloads, and the vehicle's lineage runs through the ASLV to the PSLV and GSLV.^[46]

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] Sixteen of its payloads are Indian, and after arrival the spacecraft will spend six to eight months aerobraking down to its final science orbit, on a budget ISRO puts at about 1,236 crore rupees.^[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. The program's stated goal is a crew of three in a 400-kilometer orbit for a three-day mission, protected during ascent by a solid-motor crew escape system,^[47] and a success would make India the fourth country to launch people on its own vehicle, after Russia, the United States, and China.^[48] ISRO human-rated the LVM3's Vikas core-stage engines in April 2023 and its CE20 cryogenic upper-stage engine in February 2024, the latter after 39 engine tests.^[48] 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, who had trained in Russia and India, were introduced as astronaut-designates in February 2024.^[48] 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. The mission lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on June 25, 2025, on a Falcon 9 carrying Grace, a new Crew Dragon on its first flight, with former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson commanding and astronauts from Poland and Hungary filling the other two seats.^[49][50] 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] The September 2024 cabinet decision behind that expansion reshaped Gaganyaan into eight missions to be completed by December 2028, the last of them the launch of the first station module, BAS-1, and lifted total program funding to 20,193 crore rupees, roughly 2.4 billion dollars.^[51]

Launch vehicles#

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

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] An upgrade is in ground test: the SE2000 semi-cryogenic engine, burning refined kerosene with liquid oxygen, is to power a new SC120 stage that replaces the LVM3's L110 core, and on June 24, 2026, its power head test article ran at 175 tonnes of thrust, 88 percent of the rated level, after earlier runs at 94 and 120 tonnes.^[52] 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:

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 became the 27th signatory of the Artemis Accords on June 21, 2023,^[53] 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] India's cabinet had cleared its share of the mission that March, chairman V. Narayanan announced.^[54]

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. One agreement hands an entire rocket to industry: Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) won the SSLV production rights in June 2025 with a 511 crore rupee bid,^[55] and HAL, NSIL, ISRO, and the regulator IN-SPACe signed the technology transfer agreement on September 10, 2025, which IN-SPACe calls one of the first times any space agency has handed a complete launch vehicle design to a company.^[55][56] The transfer runs two years, during which HAL builds and launches two SSLVs with ISRO's help before producing the rocket on its own.^[55] 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. Agnikul's flight, the Agnibaan SOrTeD demonstrator launched on May 30, 2024 from the company's own pad at Sriharikota, carried the world's first rocket engine 3D-printed as a single piece and was India's first launch powered by a semi-cryogenic engine.^[57] 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#

1. Chandrayaan-1 / Moon Impact Probe - NASA Science.
2. Mars Orbiter Mission - NASA Science.
3. India on the moon! Chandrayaan-3 becomes 1st probe to land near lunar south pole - Space.com.
4. India delays 1st Gaganyaan astronaut launch to 2027 - Space.com.
5. India's crewed space mission is ready for splashdown, but not launch - The Register.
6. Chandrayaan-3 Details - ISRO.
7. Chandrayaan-3 - The Planetary Society.
8. LIBS confirms the presence of Sulphur (S) on the lunar surface through unambiguous in-situ measurements - ISRO.
9. Returns to home Earth: Chandrayaan-3 Propulsion Module moved from Lunar orbit to Earth's orbit - ISRO.
10. Mission to the Venus, and to the Moon: Configuration and Scientific Objectives - ISRO.
11. India to target moon's south pole with sample return mission - SpaceNews.
12. Chandrayaan-4 mission: ISRO selects Mons Mouton site for landing - Telangana Today.
13. Halo-Orbit Insertion of Aditya-L1 Successfully Accomplished - ISRO.
14. Aditya-L1 Booklet - ISRO.
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.
18. SpaDeX Mission - ISRO.
19. SpaDeX docking of SDX-01 and SDX-02, January 16, 2025 - ISRO.
20. SpaDeX undocking successful - ISRO.
21. SpaDeX Mission: Successful demonstration of Second Docking and Power Transfer - ISRO.
22. Axiom-4 Mission: A saga of ~12 million kilometers and ~282 orbits aboard ISS - ISRO.
23. Gaganyaan-1 - Wikipedia.
24. India approves moon sample return, Venus orbiter, space station module and reusable launcher - SpaceNews.
25. 13th Meeting of the NESAC Society - ISRO.
26. PSLV-C61 / EOS-09 Mission - ISRO.
27. Indian rocket launch fails, Earth-observation satellite lost - Space.com.
28. ISRO's first 2026 mission PSLV-C62 fails - Deccan Herald.
29. India launches a huge military communications satellite to orbit using its most powerful rocket - Space.com.
30. Indian rocket launches AST SpaceMobile's next-gen BlueBird 6 satellite - SpaceNews.
31. GSLV-F15 / NVS-02 Mission - ISRO.
32. Kulasekarapattinam launch complex expected to be ready by Dec '26: ISRO Chief - DT Next.
33. NASA-ISRO Satellite Lifts Off to Track Earth's Changing Surfaces - NASA.
34. NASA-ISRO Satellite Sends First Radar Images of Earth's Surface - NASA JPL.
35. NISAR Mission Overview - NASA Science.
36. NISAR L-Band Data Now Publicly Available - NASA Earthdata.
37. Lunar Polar Exploration (LUPEX) Project Underway, Working with India to Investigate if There is Water on the Moon - JAXA.
38. PM Modi welcomes ISRO-JAXA collaboration for Chandrayaan-5 LUPEX mission - DD News.
39. First private orbital launch lifts off from Sriharikota - ISRO.
40. Skyroot Aerospace reaches orbit on first Vikram-1 launch - SpaceNews.
41. Budget 2026: ISRO sees modest funding hike for 2026-27 as Department of Space gets Rs 13,705 crore - Business Today.
42. Launch Missions - ISRO.
43. ISRO: The Indian Space Research Organization - Space.com.
44. ISRO celebrates diamond jubilee of first sounding rocket launch - ISRO.
45. Aryabhata - ISRO.
46. SLV - ISRO.
47. Gaganyaan - ISRO.
48. India unveils its first set of Gaganyaan astronauts - The Space Review.
49. Axiom's Fourth Private Mission Launches to Station Aboard Dragon - NASA.
50. Axiom Mission 4 launches atop Falcon 9 on new Crew Dragon Grace - NASASpaceFlight.
51. Bharatiya Anthariksh Station (BAS): Our own Space Station for Scientific research to be established with the launch of its first module in 2028 - Prime Minister's Office, India.
52. ISRO successfully conducted hot test of Semicryogenic Engine Power Head Test Article at higher thrust level - ISRO.
53. NASA Welcomes India as 27th Artemis Accords Signatory - NASA.
54. Centre has given go ahead for Chadrayaan-5 mission to moon: ISRO chief Narayanan - DD News.
55. In a first, HAL wins contract to build small satellite launch vehicles - Deccan Herald.
56. Technology Transfer Agreement signed for Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) - ISRO.
57. Agnikul launches World's First Rocket with Fully 3D Printed Engine - Press Information Bureau.