‘India’s record satellite launch ramps up space race’, Chinese media reported India’s triumph

Beijing, Feb 21, 2017: A better job has been done by India in promoting satellite launch technology than China which could prompt Beijing to fast-track commercialisation of its rocket launches to vie for the world's small satellite market, Chinese officials stated today.

According to PTI reports, "The launch indicated that India can send commercial satellites into space at lower costs, giving the country's competitiveness in the global race for the burgeoning commercial space businesses," said Zhang Yonghe, director with the new technology department of the Shanghai Engineering Centre for Microsatellites.

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China may think about fast-tracking the commercialisation of its rocket launches after the globally acknowledged success of India, Chinese officials were quoted as saying by Chinese-state run media in a report with the title 'India's satellite launch ramps up space race'.

The report mentioned Zhang feels that India did a better job promoting its launch services internationally than China.

Acknowledging that after reaching Mars ahead of China, India stole the limelight march by putting 104 satellites into orbit from a single rocket. "China will likely fast-track the commercialisation of its rocket launches to vie for the world s burgeoning small satellite launch market," said Zhang.

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A Global Times report said, "The Wednesday's launch is India's latest triumph for its space programme".

"In 2014, India became the fourth country to successfully send a spacecraft to orbit Mars, signaling a regional rivalry with China which suffered a failure in its Mars mission in 2012. Nearly all of its 103 smaller satellites are from other countries including Israel, Kazakhstan, Switzerland and the US," it added.

After the successful operation by the Indian Space Research Organisation, the daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China publications had said the achievement made Indians proud but it sought to belittle the significance of the mission saying that its impact and influence will be "limited".

Even though the record launch was praised as "India's triumph", today's report pointed out "with respect to the research and development of both military and commercial rocket launch services, India lags behind China, the US and Russia".

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The report quoted Zhang who said, "India cannot match them yet unless it has enough rockets types to fulfill all satellites launches.".

Xue Lijun, general manager assistant of Shenzhen Aerospace Dongfanghong Development Ltd feels that India's launch on Wednesday is a breakthrough in terms of numbers, but not in case of technology.

Xue told the Daily, "Technologically speaking, the launch did not have any big difficulties what [Indian engineers] need to do is to avoid the conflicts among satellites, which involves lots of calculation and data analysis, but is not a tough task".

"The 104 satellites are mostly in the same orbit, indicating that India still lacks capabilities of sending multiple satellites into various orbits," the "experts" were quoted as saying by the report.

– prepared by Durba Mandal of NewsGram. Twitter: @dubumerang

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