Akash Jha
Some Indian space technology entrepreneurs have made preliminary launches through partnerships with French space companies in the wake of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to France.
On the margins of Modi’s trip to France for their national July 14 celebrations, Hyderabad-based firms Skyroot Aerospace and Dhruva Space announced respective launches.
According to a statement released by the French government, Dhruva Space, a manufacturer of end-to-end satellite infrastructure, and Kineis, a new satellite operator providing worldwide connectivity for Internet of Things (IoT), are discussing the possibility of launching a satellite together.
Skyroot Aerospace, a manufacturer of launch vehicles, recently made public its interest in launching with the French space company Promethee to expand the latter’s JAPETUS earth observation satellite constellation.
The long history of cooperation between India and France in space endeavours, dating back to the 1960s, is reflected in this latest breakthrough. As part of an Indian CEO team that met with Modi and Macron in France, both Skyroot Aerospace and Agnikul Cosmos were there as further proof.
Speaking with President Emmanuel Macron and our Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the CEO forum in Paris was a tremendous privilege. AgniKul Cosmos aspires to maintain the same level of French influence that is so intrinsic to discussions on the Indian Space Programme. “There is a lot of work to be done, and I’m excited to collaborate with our French counterparts on this journey to space,” said Srinath Ravichandran, CEO and co-founder of Agnikul Cosmos.
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Upcoming launches
Earlier this year, Dhruva Space and Kineis, a satellite IoT domain oeprator based in France, inked a memorandum of understanding to jointly launch a satellite.
According to a press release from France’s space agency, Centre National D’etudes Spatiales (CNES), France and India’s first joint effort in the satellite IoT sector was the 2007 building of an oceanography satellite equipped with CNES’s Agros instrument.
As of recently, Kineis is also the Argos instrument operator for the 2022 joint Oceansat-3/Argos mission.
In order to improve Kineis’ worldwide IoT connection, the firms have announced today that they will be working together on a combined technological and commercial space initiative. This collaboration will “extend deployment of solutions worldwide, and particularly in India, for such crucial applications as smart agriculture and fishing, wildfire prevention, humanitarian convoy and wildlife tracking, monitoring of energy networks and infrastructures, transport tracking and logistics,” CNES said in a press release.
According to Sanjay Nekkanti, CEO and co-founder of Dhruva Space, “We see this partnership as one of the fruits borne of the hard work of two growing Space countries united by a common vision of the prowess of satellites.”
Launch options for Skyroot include the French space business Promethee, which produces nanosatellite constellations for earth monitoring.
As part of the JAPETUS earth observation constellation deployment, (Prométhée) and Skyroot Aerospace have chosen to investigate the possibility of using Skyroot’s Vikram launcher. According to a press statement issued by Prométhée, conversations were led by Skyroot’s co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana and Prométhée’s president, Olivier Piepsz.
