The “Modern India” podcast series invites leading voices within various fields to share their thoughts on Norway-India relations and collaboration opportunities.
In the latest episode our Regional Sales Director for Asia Pacific, Kenneth Olafsson sheds light on the latest developments in the international space industry in general and India specifically in conversation with Bjørn-Ottar Elseth, Lead for Space Transportation at The Norwegian Space Agency (NOSA).
Kenneth has been working more than 10 years in KSAT and is equipped with a broad working experience in Asia, including India. He has first-hand knowledge of the growing Indian space community and is passionate about the industry.
India has expanded its space activities widely and become one of the significant space nations the last 10 years with an ambitious space program. They are now taking a big step into the future with the recent changes in their regulatory regime that is opening up for commercial space industry.
ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organisation is responsible for the space activities in India. Now they are taking a bold and leading role in supporting the emerging private sector by accommodating the use of their launch pads and encouraging industry to build small satellites for remote sensing and satcom services.
“The space industry in India is a great example of what is possible to achieve with one of the best engineering skills in the world and a relatively small budget”, says Kenneth Olafsson.
-“Smallsat launches has been a success from day one, they know how to build and launch, and they keep on innovating , they keep doing small innovations all the time, so it will be very exciting to follow the private companies emerging within smallsats, launch and even lunar activities”.
Of other topics covered in this podcast is the BIG questions on how to use space to the benefit of life here on Earth and how we are becoming increasingly more dependent on satellites in our daily lives.1
Finally, they talked about the new sense of entrepreneurship, integration of IT and space domain, especially the large cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google´s current engagement with space industry and how that will affect the industry and data processing value chains in the new race for space data.
Listen to The Modern India podcast on Spotify or watch it here