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 India's Mangalyaan spacecraft was launched last month and then
catapulted from Earth orbit on December 1, clearing an important
hurdle on its 420 million mile journey to Mars and putting it on
course to be the first Asian mission to reach the red planet.
The venture has a price tag of just 4.5 billion rupees ($72
million), roughly one-tenth the cost of Maven, NASA's latest Mars
mission. Two-thirds of the parts for the Indian probe and rocket
were made by domestic firms like Larsen & Toubro, the country's
largest engineering firm, Godrej & Boyce, and state plane-maker
Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd.
While such companies have a long way to go before they can attract
big business in the commercial space sector, years of work on
home-grown space projects are helping them carve out a niche as
suppliers of precision parts for related sectors like defence,
aeronautics and nuclear energy.
Those firms with proven space know-how will find themselves with the
advantage as India, the world's biggest arms importer, shells out
$100 billion over a decade to modernise its military with the
country favouring local sources.
India in June strengthened a defence policy stipulating that local
firms must be considered first for contracts and foreign companies
winning contracts worth more than 3 billion rupees must "offset" at
least 30 percent of the deal's value in India.
"We think over the next two to three years we will be able to
convert this into a profit centre," said S. M. Vaidya, the business
head of Godrej's aerospace division, which made the rocket's engine
and fuel-powered thrusters for the Indian Mars probe.
Thanks to the space work, the company's engineers now know how to
handle the specific metal alloys and the high-precision welding
needed for aircraft and missiles as well as rockets, Vaidya added.
Godrej has worked with India's space agency for almost three decades
and in recent years started making engine parts for aircraft makers
Boeing Co, the Airbus unit of EADS and Israel's state-owned Rafael
Advanced Defence Systems Ltd. It is in talks with Boeing to make
parts for aircraft frames.
HOME-GROWN, GO IT ALONE
India launched its domestic space program 50 years ago and had to
develop its own rocket technology after Western powers levied
sanctions in response to a 1974 nuclear weapons test, resulting in a
"go it alone" development mentality.
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The Indian Space Research Organisation, or ISRO, has worked to keep
import costs low by designing most of the parts for its programme
that are then outsourced to the domestic private sector.
ISRO must still import some metal alloys used in the space programme
that it then gives to its contractors and Indian companies also must
buy some of the machinery needed to make the parts from Europe and
Japan.
India's heavy reliance on domestic companies for its space programme
allows it to tap homegrown technicians and engineers who earn half
as much as those in the West. Starting salaries for aerospace
engineers in India are at most $2,000 per month, according to Indian
recruitment consultancy TeamLease. The same role in the United
States brings in about $5,300 on average, according to the National
Association of Colleges and Employers.
"The commercial value of the business with ISRO is not high, it is
the spin-offs that are valuable," said M. V. Kotwal, president of
the heavy engineering division at Larsen & Toubro, which has made
$5.7 million in parts for ISRO in recent years.
L&T has also supplied $240 million worth of parts so far to ITER, an
inter-governmental science experiment that is building a
thermonuclear reactor in southern France.
Godrej earlier this year won a deal to build a frame for the world's
largest optical telescope in collaboration with University of
California, the California Institute of Technology, and the
Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy.
Walchand Nagar Industries, a Pune-headquartered company that made
100 million rupees ($1.6 million) worth of parts for India's Mars
rocket, said the project helped it win contracts worth double that
amount for a state-run nuclear plant in the western state of
Gujarat.
(Editing by Tony Munroe, Frank Jack Daniel and Matt Driskill)
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