India Must Fast-Track Its Space Surveillance — Or Risk Being Blindsided

Fifteen minutes into my conversation with him—let’s call him “Avinash,” since he does not want to be named—a seasoned Indian space technology (space tech) innovator reveals the kind of threat facing India today in a conflict situation, such as the one that happened earlier this year and which is still fresh in public memory.

“You look at the war that we had with Pakistan. The Chinese were providing real-time, space-based intelligence on our attack vectors, on our aircraft, on our movements, and that was for a skirmish. Imagine what happens when you’re fighting the Chinese.”

It is a sobering thought.

But India has its own satellite fleet, as the Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), V Narayanan, revealed soon after the conclusion of Operation Sindoor. Ten satellites are in service, round the clock, for the safety and security of India’s citizens.

“If we have to ensure the safety of our country, we have to serve through our satellites. We have to monitor our 7,000-kilometre (km) seashore areas. We have to monitor the entire northern part continuously. Without satellite and drone technology, we can’t achieve that,” he said in an address to a university in Manipur’s Imphal.

India was able to tap into its own space-based intelligence (SBS) to retaliate against Pakistan for its transgressions, starting with the Pahalgam killings. It comfortably prevailed over its adversary, so much so that the latter, after taking quite a hammering, was left with little choice but to seek a cessation of firing on day four of the conflict.

In a previous notable instance, India used satellite intelligence, likely a combination of optical and radar imagery, to carry out the ‘surgical strike’ across the Line of Control (LoC) on terrorist camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in September 2016. That action was in response to a terrorist attack on an Indian Army brigade headquarters near Uri, Jammu and Kashmir.

Can we say, then, that India is well placed with its SBS capability, sufficient to overcome similar or perhaps more powerful adversaries in the future, ideally before even a single shot is fired?

Historically, the United States (US) and the then-Soviet Union (USSR) were the earliest to get “eyes in the sky,” as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets are called, due to their Cold War and nuclear rivalry compulsions. Gradually, other countries followed suit—France, Israel, Japan, China, and India, among others.

New countries are joining this club to this day, with the latest entrants being the two Koreas, who began launching their spy satellites towards the end of 2023. South Korea plans to have five SBS satellites up in orbit with SpaceX’s help by 2025. North Korea is also keen to grow its satellite intelligence network.

The superpowers US and China, meanwhile, are rapidly extending their lead and growing ever stronger in this area.

The US, which already has over 100 active spy satellites, is building a vast new network of surveillance satellites—hundreds of them equipped with powerful Earth-observation capabilities and flying in low-earth orbit (LEO). SpaceX launched the first set of SBS satellites in May 2024.

China has more than 360 satellites, as well as hundreds more in private-sector constellations, in its ISR arsenal, and this has been worrying the US. As per a 200-page annual report of the US Department of Defence submitted to Congress in 2020, China is building its space capabilities with the intention of limiting or preventing the adversary’s use of space-based assets during a crisis or conflict.

Let alone orbits around Earth; China is planning to deploy an extensive camera network on the Moon in order to safeguard its lunar assets. The programme is called Skynet 2.0.

India is in the third decade, and version, of its space-based surveillance (SBS) programme. SBS-1 was initiated in 2001 and wrapped up by 2007, by which time two Cartosats were in orbit carrying out surveillance duties. Cartosat-1, with its resolution of 2.5 metres (m), was able to distinguish a small car on the ground from space.

The first Cartosats, however, were not India’s first foray into satellite intelligence. Previously, the Technology Experiment Satellite (TES), launched in 2001 as a precursor to proper spy satellites, assisted the Indian Army with 1-m-resolution panchromatic image feeds (black and white imaging across a broad spectrum of light). Using TES, India could pick up images of a truck moving along the border area of Pakistan. It also took photos of the war in Afghanistan at the time.

Before satellites, the Indian armed forces relied on high-altitude MiG-25 “Foxbat” aircraft for their ISR activities in the 1980s and 1990s. Even earlier, during the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan, the British-built twin-jet bomber and reconnaissance aircraft Canberra was a crucial cog in India’s ISR wheel. It provided detailed photographic intelligence, helping the Indian Air Force (IAF) plan air strikes and assess battlefield damage.

By the mid-2000s, the Indian armed forces were eager and ready to tap into space to strengthen their warfighting capabilities. But it took a while for SBS-2, launched in 2013, to get going. A handful of satellites were added to India’s satellite surveillance network.

By the end of the decade, talk of SBS-3 had begun. Once again, the turnaround took time. Around the middle of this decade, the SBS-3 got the go-ahead.

India’s SBS network today is primarily composed of about 10 satellites—seven optical ones of the Cartosat series, namely 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D, 2E, and 2F, which offer a resolution from 0.65 m to 1 m (the satellites can clearly tell two objects apart if they are separated by a distance of 0.65 m to 1 m), along with the Cartosat-3 with a higher resolution of 0.3 m, and three synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites, mainly the RISAT (Radar Imaging Satellite).

Radar satellites work well in tandem with optical satellites. If there is cloud cover over a certain area, optical satellites cannot see the area underneath. Radar satellites, on the other hand, can penetrate clouds and also deliver imagery at any time of day, unconstrained by darkness.

So that leaves us with about a dozen satellites at best to carry out surveillance, part of India’s larger remote-sensing network of just about two dozen satellites. Is that sufficient?

“Had the situation not been this tough on both our fronts, the eastern and western front; had it been not so challenging on the oceanic side, our current space-based surveillance capability would have been sufficient,” says Chaitanya Giri, a Fellow at Observer Research Foundation's Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology with a focus on India’s space ecosystem.

India is faced with a multitude of challenges, and not all alike either.

“The threats that we are wanting to ward off are quite complex, heterogenous, and they entail both state and non-state actors, especially on our north-eastern front. And also on the western front, it is safe to assume that Bangladesh, Myanmar, Pakistan have become zones of great power games. So we are not just fighting extremist, anti-India elements sitting in these three zones, but we are also fighting their backers who are in the dark right now. These players are quite space-capable. They are enabling a lot of anti-India factions,” Giri explains.

He adds, “And for that reason, whatever we have as our space-based assets for the past 15-20 years are no more sufficient. The faster we move, the more assets and contingencies we have in space, the better it is for us.”

Avinash believes the state of India's space-based surveillance today is “very poor” and that “we are lagging way too much.”

“The Chinese have the capability of monitoring our northern areas every 8 minutes. Our capability extends in multiple weeks. So our ability to monitor the same location using Indian assets is more than a few weeks,” he says.

India’s use of foreign assets and data, such as from Maxar and Sentinel, covers up our “operational inadequacies” but India must not rely on it for too long. “Indian sovereignty cannot be guaranteed by foreign companies and interests. So there is a massive requirement for our own, much more diverse, and multisensor constellation, which is distributed, resilient, and impervious to any actions,” Avinash says.

Here is how its limited surveillance capabilities constrain India:

“The resolution of the Cartosat series of satellites is about 0.8 to 1 m. Which means that in an image, 1 pixel is 1 m. The car will be visible in 4 pixels only. Relating this to the border: none of your vehicles will be clearly identifiable, none of the tanks will be identifiable, trucks will be hardly identifiable; only aircraft and such things you can see,” said another space-tech innovator who also did not want to be named. Let us call him “Ravi.”

“We do not have global observational capability, though we have satellites. If you want to take imagery of another strategic location and give information, we do not have real-time capability. It can come maybe a few days later,” the former chairman of ISRO, S Somanath, said during the Air Chief Marshal PC Lal 38th Memorial Lecture in June 2023.

During the talk, he also said India’s Earth-observation satellite fleet needed to be ten times the existing count of 24 (as of mid-2023).

Speaking at the Engineers Conclave 2022 just a year earlier, Somanath emphasised the need to have continuous observation capability all across the globe in order for the nation to be truly safe.

“We have been looking at India, but if you really want to be a safe nation, I think we need to have the capability to observe the entire globe and make our own assessment,” he said.

Hearing from top voices in the industry, the government and the space and defence establishments are well aware of India’s surveillance limitations. However, the SBS-3 is set to make amends.

The nearly ₹27,000-crore programme led by the Defence Space Agency (DSA) will put up 52 satellites in space for surveillance over the next five years.

The satellite workload will be shared between ISRO and the private industry, with the agency developing 21 satellites, and the industry 31.

Three unnamed players have been picked to develop the private sector’s share of the satellites. Other companies that might have a role to play include Digantara, Pixxel, and Dhruva Space, who have strengths in space situational awareness, Earth observation, and satellites and ground systems, respectively.

The first of the SBS-3 satellites might launch in April 2026, and the constellation might be rounded up by 2029, though the exact timelines are unclear as they get stretched and squeezed every so often in media reports.

Under SBS-3, ISRO plans to deploy very-high-resolution optical and infrared imaging satellites; wide-swath (covering a large area in a single sweep), high-resolution imaging satellites for systematic coverage; SAR satellites for ocean applications, particularly for tracking ships or vessels, including very-high-resolution SAR satellites for all-day, all-weather imaging; a high-resolution stereo imaging satellite for three-dimensional (3D) mapping; an advanced geoimaging satellite for persistent observations of large areas; and Microsats for launches on demand using ISRO’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV).

The particular satellites in the constellation are likely to include Cartosat-1A, the Cartosat-3S series (3A through 3F), the RISAT-2BS series (R3, R4, R5), Microsats-2A and -2B, and A-GISAT (Advanced Geo Imaging Satellite).

The A-GISAT, for example, will be a large satellite positioned in geostationary orbit at 36,000 km, supporting high-resolution imagery of India as a whole. The A-GISAT could, for instance, identify areas of interest and, if necessary, notify other, higher-resolution satellites in lower Earth orbits to investigate those areas more closely.

HRSAT (High Resolution Satellite) is set to be a constellation of at least two satellites in a single orbital plane with sub-metre resolution in panchromatic imagery and a daily revisit capability. It will provide, as the name suggests, high-resolution imagery, along with day-and-night monitoring capability.

Similarly, HysIS (Hyperspectral Imaging Satellite) has been indicated to be part of SBS-3. A HysIS satellite was launched in 2018. It images the Earth’s surface in the visible, near-infrared, and shortwave infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The various satellites will be spread across different Earth orbits, from geostationary (GEO) to medium (MEO) to low-Earth orbit (LEO), forming what is being referred to as “a layered architecture.” Even “very LEO” will be a potential orbital destination in case of an urgent need for a critical assessment of a particular area or a developing situation.

Resolutions are expected to be 5 m or better for GEO satellites, 1 m for hyperspectral ones (light capture in dozens to hundreds of very narrow bands, often across visible, near-infrared, and shortwave infrared ranges), and 10 cm for multispectral ones (light capture in a few broad bands, like red, green, blue, near-infrared).

The satellite constellation will aim to have a short revisit time of better than six hours regardless of the time of day or weather conditions. Data from the satellites will be relayed to end users in real-time or near-real-time.

More importantly, going beyond simply collecting data and transmitting it to ground stations for analysis, the network will have data fusion and analysis capabilities built in. On-board data processing, smart sensing, the use of machine learning (ML/AI), and autonomous decision-making are expected. Satellites will be able to provide only the information necessary rather than transmit the entire dataset to a ground station for full analysis.

Notably, and perhaps for the first time in India, the SBS-3 satellites will be able to communicate with one another. “We’ll have communications between satellites so that if some satellite which is at a geostationary orbit of 36,000 km detects something, it can have a large view, and if you find some activity happening (on Earth), you can task another satellite which is in LEO to look at it much more carefully and then give more information,” Somanath explained at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay Techfest in 2023.

It is also said that the Army, Navy, and Air Force will get dedicated satellites. The Indian Navy in particular will have a key role to play since high-resolution SAR imaging on SBS-3 will be focused on surveilling the oceans. Maritime surveillance is critical for India because it has the Arabian Sea to the west, the Bay of Bengal to the east, and the Indian Ocean to the south. The majority of trade, including critical resources like oil, passes through these seas.

The Standing Committee on Defence highlighted this aspect in a 2019 report in connection with SBS-3. “In view of the vast area (7000 nm [nautical miles] x 5000 nm) involved, space-based surveillance is the optimum method for maintaining surveillance over IOR (Indian Ocean Region)... This proposal (SBS-3 programme)... includes maritime-specific applications with large coverage, which would be of pivotal significance in building MDA (maritime domain awareness) and triggering other assets for target tracking,” it said.

“Chinese submarines deployed on missions could have their pens underground, so that some amount of stealth, secrecy is maintained on their movement. These kinds of inputs you may not be able to get from an LRMP (long-range maritime patrol) aircraft which is moving around there, whereas when a satellite is top of the area, it can be used to provide a very clear picture,” Commodore (Cmde) Venugopal Vengalil, who served in the Indian Navy for 30 years before retiring as naval officer in charge, Maharashtra, told Swarajya.

Given the importance of MDA, India and France are also collaborating to develop an Indo-French maritime-specific satellite surveillance system, comprising six to eight satellites, as part of a joint ISRO-CNES programme. India wants to be able to detect enemy submarines in the Indo-Pacific and track any adversarial infrastructure development occurring around India’s land and sea borders.

“For us, protecting the ocean and both the seas on the east and west is as important as the land borders on Pakistan and China. So it is very important that we do ocean surveillance,” said Radha Krishna Kavuluru, Associate Director, Software and Firmware, Dhruva Space. “And that is where companies like PeerSight, which is doing SAR satellites, and sigint (signals intelligence) and elint (electronic intelligence) missions, which can monitor ship or vessel communication, will come into the picture.”

Sigint satellites are like ears in space, always listening for clues about what is happening on Earth via radio signals, such as from military radios, radar systems, and communication networks. Elint satellites focus on non-communication signals, like radar. For example, when a radar is turned on at a military base, it sends out a signal to detect planes. Satellites in space can detect this radar signal, figure out its location, and even identify the type of radar.

SAR satellites, which will be part of the SBS-3 network, come in handy for these applications. “Sometimes, military ships, like some Chinese vessels, turn off their public (communication) beacons. When they do that, our antennas cannot detect them. But these space radar satellites can detect them. So it is essential. But India doesn't have sufficient capability today,” Ravi said.

The West, led by the US, has already conquered space-based elint and sigint, he added. “Europe has a lot of companies which do elint and sigint today. The US already has a big fleet of those satellites. China has hundreds of such satellites. India, none,” Ravi said.

Actually, India does have one dedicated elint satellite by the name of Emisat, developed by ISRO for the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). It was launched in 2019 and, as per ISRO’s terse description, “is intended for electromagnetic spectrum measurement.” It is said to be able to catch signals from military radars, among other strategically important sources.

The private industry, it is safe to say, is still far away from materialising any elint or sigint satellite capabilities. Work on the SBS-3 may provide an opportunity for them to build new muscle.

Elint and sigint aside, there is also something called comint, short for communications intelligence.

Comint satellites are like ears in orbit that tune into human voices and messages across the globe, even if they are whispered or scrambled. They catch voice- or message-based communication between people, such as military radio chatter, satellite phone calls, encrypted voice messages, and data sent between command centres.

Like sigint and elint, comint too is part of India’s scheme of things with SBS-3, as it should be, with even friendly nations playing mischief with India in space.

In his June 2023 lecture, Somanath told a predominantly Air Force audience that the satellites of even friendly nations sometimes ventured close to Indian satellites in orbit and that this was unwelcome. “From our radars, we can see they move their satellites very close to our satellites, and they go around our satellites and look at them more closely. These are all not-so-welcome attitudes for anybody,” he said, necessitating a close watch on Indian satellites to safeguard them.

An experienced space industry professional said China does this with the US. “Say a US satellite is supposed to be the base station for communications. Let us say a US aircraft, because there is no terrestrial network, talks with satellites, which is satcom. Say this is the satellite which it (the aircraft) is communicating with. What the Chinese will do is they will have one of their satellites just stand beside the US satellite and listen into the communications. We call that comint,” he explained, adding that India is still a very long way from engaging in the kinds of space operations that advanced spacefaring nations undertake.

With the private sector called upon to do the heavy lifting on SBS-3, the satellite sizes will decrease in many cases, making launches a swifter, more affordable affair, except when the occasional larger satellite has to be flown to orbit. This aligns with the global space industry’s general shift from larger satellites to smaller ones.

“The Cartosats cost more than Rs 100–200 crore. And they are very, very big satellites, the size of a small bedroom. When this work is essentially outsourced to private companies, they can develop similar quality imaging systems with smaller satellites and at a lower cost,” Ravi says.

ISRO developed the SSLV specifically to tap into the growing small satellite market. The rocket can launch nano, micro, and mini satellites in large numbers quickly and affordably. That is what is needed in launching military-focused satellite constellations like SBS-3, where quantity matters.

“We need quantity more than quality. Quality is for scientific purposes. But for the forces and security, it is always quantity. We only need monitoring, right? We just need to know there is a vehicle there; we do not need to see it in great detail. So we need quantity, and, for that, we need smaller satellites in huge numbers,” Ravi says.

Avinash echoes Ravi’s thoughts. “In today’s field, where the enemy has the capability to disrupt your satellites in space, it has the capability to cause damage to your assets in space, you need distributed intelligence, and you need distributed resilience to ensure your assets in space are safe. Like Hydra, cut one head, multiple emerge; that should be the capability we should be looking at,” he says, referencing the Greek legend of a gigantic, nine-headed water serpent that haunted the swamps of Lerna, near Argos (Greece), and who, upon getting one of its heads chopped off, would grow two more in its place, as the legendary hero Heracles (or Hercules) learnt in battle with Hydra.

“Launching a satellite that can do 10 cm imagery on the ground but costs $2 billion is good, but launching hundreds of satellites with the capability to do, say, 50 cm on the ground, which is still a usable resolution… Now you have a hundred satellites, your revisit time is in the order of hours, and you now have the capability that even if one satellite is taken out, or say 10 satellites are taken out, you still have 90 on the dock. And that is the way we should be thinking,” Avinash says.

We should be thinking in this way “because our adversary is extremely smart, is extremely determined, has a 50-year game plan compared to the three-year game plan we have, which is usually defined by election cycles in India,” he adds.

There is at least one space-tech company in India that is innovating along these lines, and they even won a defence contract earlier this month under the Indian government’s Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX) initiative. “We were the first winners of iDEX Prime in space,” says the chief executive officer of Kepler Aerospace, Navneet Singh, adding, “We are very happy to work with iDEX and DSA.”

iDEX Prime supports innovative defence projects with funding of up to Rs 10 crore, beyond the Rs 1.5-crore grant provided under iDEX. This defence initiative is also a path to procurement for the armed forces as per the Defence Acquisition Procedure, 2020.

“We work on swarming satellites with the capability of hyper-intelligent satellites that are able to think for themselves. We are more of a tactical intelligence system where we help look at targets of opportunities, where we look at needles in the haystacks. We help find things that normally you will not find with a simple satellite picture or a scan of an area. And we help increase the fidelity and the EM coverage of a target,” Singh says.

The Kepler chief is working with the DSA to deliver the world’s first swarming constellation of six satellites for ISR purposes.

“Kepler is an interesting company. The critical tech there, more than the payload, is the communication between each other. There is a critical component which is intersatellite links (ISL). Today none of the Indian satellites have ISL. Most of the satellites developed by the West and China today are connected with each other and to the ground simultaneously,” Ravi says. ISL will be a critical component of SBS-3.

Kepler is not new to the space-tech and ISRO ecosystem. It works with the space agency as one of the primary ground station and mission operations partners, operating a network of almost 18–20 ground stations. “We have done the mission operations for the SpaDeX satellite, which was a space-docking experiment,” he says. The SpaDeX mission demonstrated docking in space using two small spacecraft launched by PSLV in December 2024.

For SBS-3, Kepler is mainly in the ground-station-as-a-service vertical, while also working with some of their partners to deliver satellite subsystems. “We do space hardware. We deliver satellite positioning systems, onboard antennas, communication systems, navigation systems,” Singh explains, finding SBS-3 a good step forward to advance India’s SBS capabilities.

Singh, who describes Kepler as an electronic warfare company, says India should “prioritise a lot of elint satellites, with a push for a larger share of radio frequency (RF) satellites compared to any other sensors.”

“If you look at Chinese intelligence gathering capability, the majority of their satellites are electronic warfare satellites, and they use that as a targeting system for higher-fidelity sensors. So that is the way to do future warfare, and electronic warfare is the future, especially when it comes to present-day battlefields. You can see what is happening in Ukraine, Gaza,” he says.

“SBS-3 is a step in the right direction, though it is still inadequate,” says Avinash. SBS-3 is mainly focused on electro-optical systems, and the resolution expected of the network “is not up to the global benchmarks, standards.” But more than that, he adds, “It is a problem of bureaucracy and Indian tech capability, especially of the private sector. Bigger satellites with better capability are much more expensive, and that is how things are, and it takes time.”

In Giri’s view, the private sector is up to the task. “The satellites can be built. The downstream data pipelines can be created. These are not the issues. The private sector must move faster on demonstrating full-stack launches,” he says, recommending that the private sector, especially those who have been given the SSLV access, should quickly get the launch vehicle the space-proven tag. “Once the space-proven tag comes along, then you can have some of the SBS-3 satellites — the initial ones, at least a few dummy ones — launched. The ultimate goal is to develop quick-reaction and launch-on-demand capabilities, and these two should be attained well within the next five years. The tactical window is closing fast on us. ISRO-like project timescales would not help.”

Ravi believes that the government knows the work is cut out for India’s private space sector, but is nevertheless firm in backing the players. “For any country, the space ecosystem will be a little challenging in the beginning. And I am sure the government also understands that there will be significant failures. But I think the government wants to handhold and encourage companies so that they succeed, if not in one try, then maybe the second. That is why they are supporting such a large number of satellites. And at the end of the day, I think the government will have what it wants,” Ravi says.

The first step that the Indian industry must take, according to him, is to make a regular multispectral camera or payload. “A multispectral camera is just like a normal camera which has red, green, and blue bands. That is the first step. There someone has to succeed,” he says.

Two satellites with such imaging capabilities are already in orbit. One is the TSAT-1A sub-metre optical satellite developed by Satellogic in collaboration with Tata Advanced Systems Limited (TASL), and the other is the ABA First Runner, developed by Azista BST Aerospace.

While appreciating their accomplishments, Ravi points out that “everything is not indigenous” with these two satellites, referring to the American and German (BST is short for Berlin Space Technology) partnerships, and that he “would love to see an Indian company do it.”

While SBS-3 is on its way, Avinash thinks the government should have launched both SBS-3 and SBS-4 programmes concurrently. “The time it took to get SBS-3 Cabinet Committee approval and ready for actual ordering, it is already quite late. And if we start the process of SBS-4 today, by the time the first SBS-4 satellites will be ready, the present SBS-3 satellites will be defunct and deorbiting,” he says.

In that, he finds a “lack of long-term strategic thinking when it comes to space-based surveillance” in India, acknowledging, however, that things are nevertheless changing.

As regional conflicts increasingly break out in different parts of the world — for one, who would have thought Thailand and Cambodia would be clashing at the border? — “one truth emerges with clarity,” as Chief of Integrated Defence Staff Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit said in an address in June 2025, “The side that sees first, sees farthest, and sees most accurately prevails.”