# Indian Space Research Organisation The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is [[India]]'s national space agency. Founded in 1969 and headquartered in Bengaluru, it reports through the Department of Space directly to the prime minister. It builds and flies India's rockets ([[GSLV]], [[SSLV]], the workhorse PSLV and the heavy LVM3), its satellites, and its Moon and Mars missions. Its chairman since January 2025 is V. Narayanan, a rocket-propulsion engineer. ISRO's reputation rests on doing ambitious things for very little money. That reputation is real, it is politically valuable, and in 2025–26 it ran into its first serious stretch of trouble in years. ## From a church to the Moon India's space program began in 1962 under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, with the physicist Vikram Sarabhai as its driving force. Its first rocket, a small American-supplied sounding rocket, went up in 1963 from Thumba, a fishing village in Kerala, where a local church had become the launch office. ISRO itself was formed in 1969. The milestones since: - **1975** — India's first satellite, Aryabhata, launched on a Soviet rocket. - **1980** — India reaches orbit on its own rocket, the SLV-3. - **1990s–2000s** — the PSLV becomes one of the world's most reliable launchers. In 2017 it set a record by deploying 104 satellites on one flight. - **2014** — Mangalyaan reaches Mars orbit, making India the first Asian country to get there and the first country to do it on its first try, for roughly $74 million — less than the budget of the Hollywood film *Gravity*, a comparison Indian officials and media repeated widely. - **2023** — Chandrayaan-3 lands near the Moon's south pole, the first landing in that region, after Chandrayaan-2's lander crashed in 2019. [[Narendra Modi]] named the landing site "Shiv Shakti" (a Hindu religious reference) and declared August 23 India's National Space Day. - **2025** — Shubhanshu Shukla becomes the first Indian astronaut aboard the [[International Space Station]], flying on a private [[Axiom Space]] mission. Also that year, the joint [[NASA]]-ISRO NISAR radar satellite launched on a GSLV. ## Built under sanctions ISRO's history is also a history of being cut off. In 1992 the United States sanctioned ISRO to block a Russian sale of cryogenic rocket-engine technology. ISRO spent two decades building the engine itself, which is why the [[GSLV]] story is now told in India as a story of self-reliance. The same pattern runs through India's missile and nuclear programs: Western restrictions slowed India down and then left it with capabilities it owes no one for. ## Opening up, and hitting turbulence In 2020 India opened its space sector to private companies, creating a regulator (IN-SPACe) and a commercial arm (NewSpace India Limited). Startups such as Skyroot Aerospace and Agnikul Cosmos now build their own rockets, and in 2025 ISRO handed its small [[SSLV]] rocket to the state-owned defense firm Hindustan Aeronautics to manufacture. Then the workhorse faltered. The PSLV failed in May 2025 and again on 12 January 2026, both times because of a problem in its third stage. Two failures in eight months by a rocket long treated as near-flawless led to an outside review committee and a launch pause of nearly eight months, which ended with a successful [[GSLV]] flight on 4 September 2026. The human spaceflight program, Gaganyaan, has also slipped. ISRO's chairman said in January 2026 that the first uncrewed test flight was planned for March 2026 and the first crewed flight for 2027. By late June 2026 he was signaling that the uncrewed test could slide into 2027. India's longer-range goals are its own space station by 2035 and an Indian astronaut on the Moon by 2040. ## Why it's on the map ISRO matters to this wiki for three reasons. It is the main evidence that a developing democracy can build a world-class space program on a small budget, which complicates the American assumption that serious space capability requires either a superpower budget or a [[SpaceX]]. It is the clearest long-run case study of what U.S. technology sanctions actually achieve. And under [[Narendra Modi]], it has become a central piece of national-prestige politics, with Moon landings presented as proof of a rising, self-reliant India. That makes ISRO's recent failures political as well as technical. ## See also - [[GSLV]] · [[SSLV]] — two of ISRO's rockets - [[India]] · [[Narendra Modi]] — the country and its leader - [[NASA]] — partner on NISAR, despite the 1992 sanctions history - [[Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency]] — partner on a planned joint lunar polar mission - [[Arianespace]] — the European launch company that carried many of India's heaviest communications satellites - [[Space Hub]] — the parent hub