Democratizing space: India’s frugal space innovation provides key lessons for emerging nations

Abstract

Space exploration is often assumed to require very large budgets, which can deter emerging space programmes before they begin. India’s recent missions have helped shift perceptions of that cost barrier by showing that major milestones can be achieved on budgets in the tens of millions. In 2023, Chandrayaan-3 landed near the Moon’s south pole on a budget of about $75 million (1, 2). A decade earlier, India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan, 2013) reached Mars orbit for roughly $74 million, about one-seventh the cost of NASA’s MAVEN orbiter (3, 4). These examples do not imply that high-investment programmes such as Artemis or MAVEN are inefficient, nor that lower mission cost is always preferable. Instead, they illustrate how frugal innovation can be effective when mission goals and risk tolerance permit. Here, “frugal” refers to disciplined mission scoping, reuse of proven designs, and procurement choices that reduce cost while making risk trade-offs explicit (5). Using India’s space programme as a case, we argue that mission-selection criteria and procurement rules should reward disciplined scoping, cost-conscious engineering, and modular reuse and iteration. Such rules can help governments, firms, universities, and international collaborations to learn by flying missions, produce scientific results, and deploy operational systems in orbit. This enables a mix of complementary, tightly scoped missions that can, where feasible, sit alongside larger flagship missions.