For a decade, India has prided itself for the low-cost space missions launched and successfully completed by ISRO. Most famously, ISRO’s 2014 Mars mission cost less than the Hollywood space adventure film Gravity. In that context a new report is bound to create a flutter. A peer-reviewed study by economists Alessio Terzi (Cambridge) and Francesco Nicoli (Turin), published in the journal Economics Letters, finds that India is now “the most expensive among the six markets capable of launching rockets carrying satellites.”
The numbers are startling. At the end of 2025, the study reckons, putting a satellite into orbit from India cost $13,302 per kg — more than four times the United States’ $3,225, the cheapest in the world. India came out dearer than the European Union, Russia, China and Japan; even second-placed Europe, at $9,897 per kg, looks a bargain by comparison. The prices cover launches marketed by NewSpace India (NSIL), ISRO’s commercial arm, aboard a mix of Indian rockets.
That is an uncomfortable result for a country whose pitch to the world has rested, as The Wire puts it, on “the frugality of its scientific space missions.”
The paradox eases a little on a closer look. India’s frugality legend rests on total mission cost — building and flying a cut-price Mars orbiter — not on dollars per kilogram to orbit. And the US benchmark is really a SpaceX story: reusable boosters flown at high volume have collapsed the cost per kg in a way no expendable rocket can match. India, still flying its rockets once and discarding them, is being measured against a different game. The gap, in other words, is less about profligacy than about capability — India has yet to field the reusable, heavy-lift rockets that make launches cheap at scale. But it is real, and it will matter more as India opens launch to private players and chases a bigger slice of the commercial market.
What, then, should India aim for? Chaitanya Giri of the Observer Research Foundation offers a bracingly realistic answer. “What India needs is an inherent, recurring customer, which in most cases is the government,” he says; genuinely commercial clients are “far and few – that’s true for all rocket operators worldwide.” The sensible target, he argues, is to get costs down “to match the EU first, and then Japan, to levels of about $7,000 per kg.” As for catching America: “Rivalling the US is too far into the future, we don’t have the technical capabilities to do that.”
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