India–France Space Cooperation Targets Military Surveillance Capabilities

India and France are stepping up their partnership in space technology into the realm of satellite production and defence related monitoring, the Financial Express has reported, quoting a $5 million deal between India’s Dhruva Space and France’s Safran Space on the construction of 275 satellites. The report suggests that while India’s space-based surveillance capacity is growing, this particular partnership falls under the Space-Based Surveillance Phase III programme, which is a larger and more ambitious mission to improve monitoring of India’s land and water territories via an expanded satellite fleet.

Dhruva Space–Safran Partnership Highlights Satellite Manufacturing

Distributed satellite constellations allow monitoring many sites on several continents repeatedly to detect changes to land borders, coastlines, and seascape approaches. The spacecraft can be equipped with an optical payload, a radar, or other sensors. Especially with radar imaging, observation can be more independent of clouds or limited sunlight, and distributed constellations can lower reliance on a small number of large spacecrafts.

However, the operational utility of constellations depends on the constellation and orbital designs, including, for example, the ground infrastructure, the revisit time, the sensor capabilities, and the downlink capabilities. The large share of the private sector in the reported agreement indicates an increased importance of private players in India’s space activities, their manufacturing capabilities, specialised components, and also the potential for cross-border collaboration.

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