CDS Gen Anil Chauhan calls for safeguarding India’s assets in space

Chief of Defence Staff Gen Anil Chauhan, Chief of Defence Staff shares inaugural address at ISpA Indian DefSpace Symposium 2023 on April 11

The Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) of the Indian Armed Forces Gen Anil Chauhan on April 11 called for enhancing India’s space situational awareness capability to safeguard the country’s assets in space.

Space situational awareness means understanding the orbital environment better with accurate data on space radiation and where each object is located.

While speaking at Indian Space Association’s Indian DefSpace Symposium, Chauhan said, “The populating of the space domain and the emergence of dynamic threat environment to our space assets also demands that we enhance our space situational awareness capability.”

“There’s also a requirement to safeguard our assets with counter space capabilities. We must build resilience and redundancy in a space-based infrastructure,” he added.

There are around 5,000 satellites in low-earth orbit (altitude of less than 1,000 km) today. In the future, that number could touch 70,000, making it difficult for launch vehicles or satellites to navigate in orbit, apart from the same posing a national security issue as Chauhan pointed out.

On January 3, Bengaluru-based Digantara, which offers solutions in space situational awareness, successfully launched its Pushan-Alpha satellite from a SpaceX rocket. The satellite, which will serve as a technology demonstrator, will first measure radiation in the sun's synchronous orbit and study space for space-debris modelling.

Apart from that, the CDS also stressed developing dual-use platforms, expanding India's NavIC (homegrown navigation) constellation, providing agile space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and ensuring secure satellite-assisted communications.

“We also need to explore the field of satellite miniaturisation and reusable launch platforms to mitigate cost and challenges, and accelerate the pace of augmenting our space-based capabilities,” he said.

Samir V Kamat, Chairman of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), who was also present at the IsPA event, said, “We at DRDO have started increasing our focus on the very critical space domain with focus on space-based surveillance, space situational awareness, protecting our space-based assets.”

“We are now looking at working very closely with industry as well as academia right from the development stage and have started DRDO industry-academia centres of excellence in about 15 institutions mostly within the country,” Kamat added.

Lt. Gen. AK Bhatt (Retd.), Director General of Indian Space Association, said, “The symposium will pave the way forward of how we leverage international space cooperation and also the policy and strategy for building an overall comprehensive difference space strategy.”