A significant change in the worldwide commercial launch industry was recently brought to light by Indian space businesses Pixxel and Dhruva Space, which chose SpaceX over ISRO to launch their satellites. Cost competitiveness per kilogramme to orbit is the main problem.
Although ISRO’s missions are sometimes praised for being less expensive than Hollywood productions, this comparison ignores the business reality, as SpaceX’s expenses per kilogramme are thought to be less than half of ISRO’s fees. According to industry observers, ISRO is far more appealing to commercial clients because its base cost is four to five times more than SpaceX’s.
Launch economics has been completely revolutionised by SpaceX’s reusable rocket technology. Their Falcon 9 booster has been shown to fly up to 23 times and can be reused in 21 days. Compared to throwaway rockets, this reusability allows for cost savings of up to 70%. SpaceX claims that launch costs approximately $67 million each flight, while their marginal cost for reusable boosters may be as low as $30 million. ISRO’s rockets, on the other hand, are still disposable and need to be rebuilt entirely for every flight.
The most obvious difference between SpaceX and ISRO is the frequency of launches. Prime Minister Modi recently admitted that India only performs five to six rocket launches a year, and he set the lofty goal of fifty launches yearly by 2030. In the meantime, SpaceX has already launched its Falcon 9 more than 100 times in 2025 and has performed 134 launches in 2024 alone. Because of this glaring disparity, commercial clients must wait a lot longer with ISRO.
There are serious repercussions for ISRO’s commercial viability from its slow launch pace. In the first eight months of 2025, ISRO made just three launches, while the US, China, and Russia made 120, 49, and 11 launches, respectively. Waiting for the next ISRO slot can be more expensive for satellite companies with time-sensitive missions and debt-financed projects than paying more for SpaceX’s speedier services.
Instead of depending on the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for satellite launches, Indian commercial enterprises have been turning more and more to SpaceX in recent years. Although the companies themselves have not made the precise reasons public, a closer look at the global launch industry and ISRO’s present state of operations identifies many key elements: affordability, dependability, regular launch possibilities, and rocket availability in general.
First off, SpaceX has quickly become a world leader in the commercial spaceflight industry. The business maintained a fast pace of operations, successfully completing 134 launches in 2024 alone. Its workhorse rocket, Falcon-9, demonstrated operational scalability and technical dependability by flying over 100 times by mid-2025.
Whether from big governments or small start-ups, satellites rarely experience deployment delays thanks to this unmatched launch tempo. Customers from all across the world, including commercial satellite manufacturers in India, are therefore drawn to SpaceX in order to avoid the operational risks involved in waiting for rare launch windows elsewhere.
However, ISRO has continued to have a limited launch schedule. Only five to seven launches per year have been carried out by the Indian space agency in recent years. The increased commercial demand, especially from small satellite operators and new-age space-tech firms that rely on timely satellite deployment for financial viability, cannot be met by this comparatively limited number.
Importantly, ISRO has yet to carry out a single commercial launch in 2025. Rather than being a lucrative commercial service, its primary mission of the year—the highly anticipated July launch of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite—was a scientific collaboration. Despite ISRO’s commitment to launch the private satellite BlueBird, which is based in the United States, the mission has been postponed until early 2026. Customers’ opinion that ISRO’s commercial services are unpredictable is strengthened by these delays.
ISRO’s business difficulties are exacerbated by its technical limitations. Due to the LVM-3’s limited capacity to deliver 4,000 kg to Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit, India is forced to depend on SpaceX for larger satellites, such as the 4,700 kg GSAT-N2. The commercial market reach of ISRO is significantly limited by this payload limitation.
When ISRO’s workhorse PSLV-C61 failed during its third stage in May 2025—a rare failure for the generally dependable rocket—the situation deteriorated. What’s more worrisome is that ISRO broke with its transparency practice by not making the Failure Analysis Committee report publicly available, which could have an impact on global consumer confidence.
The PSLV-C61 failure report is still unknown, in contrast to earlier mission failures when ISRO swiftly published thorough failure investigation findings. International consumers that demand high standards of accountability from launch service providers are concerned about this deviation from transparency requirements. When choosing launch providers, commercial clients increasingly consider this opacity to be a risk concern.
In 2025, ISRO’s commercial performance has been very poor. Even planned missions, such as the BlueBird satellite launch, have been postponed to January–March 2026, and the agency has not conducted a single commercial flight in 2025. Due to its unreliable scheduling, ISRO is not a desirable choice for business clients with tight deadlines.
When one considers that SpaceX maintains a steady high-frequency launch schedule that enables customers to book slots with assurance, ISRO managed only 7 launches in 15 months out of a target of 30 (reaching only 23 percent of its launch target).
The airline business and the global commercial space launch market function similarly: regular operators draw more passengers. A strong value case is produced by SpaceX’s capacity to provide several launch opportunities all year long, along with its cost advantages and payload flexibility. Customers can further divide expenses through the company’s ride-share concept, which further lowers the cost of space access.
Indian businesses such as Dhruva Space and Pixxel have acknowledged these industry realities. Pixxel increased the number of satellites in their constellation to six with the launch of three Firefly hyper-spectral satellites through SpaceX. With its cutting-edge artificial intelligence and hyper-spectral payloads, Dhruva Space’s LEAP-1 satellite marks its first commercial mission. These businesses selected SpaceX because of its better availability, dependability, and commercial terms rather than because they lacked patriotism.
Launch economics have changed dramatically as a result of SpaceX’s ground-breaking approach to rocket reusability. SpaceX has significantly reduced manufacturing costs by reusing its Falcon 9 first stage up to 23 times, while ISRO is still producing new rockets for every mission. The business’s emphasis on learning from mistakes and quick iterations stands in stark contrast to ISRO’s more conservative, government-focused strategy.
This benefit of reusability goes beyond financial savings to include operational adaptability. Shorter customer wait periods and more frequent launches are made possible by SpaceX’s ability to keep a bigger fleet of available rockets. Reusable rockets can save up to 70% on launch expenses, which SpaceX passes along to customers in part while keeping high profit margins.
Addressing these competitive disadvantages is urgent, as evidenced by Prime Minister Modi’s ambitious plan to create five space startups and launch 50 launches annually by 2030. More than 300 space startups have already been created as a result of the government’s space sector reforms, but in order to thrive internationally, these businesses require dependable, reasonably priced launch services.
Promising recent developments include the awarding of major contracts, including a ₹1,200 crore Earth Observation constellation project, to Indian consortiums led by Pixxel, Dhruva Space, SatSure, and PierSight. Nevertheless, unless ISRO resolves its core competitiveness problems, these private businesses will probably keep depending on foreign launch providers.
ISRO must adopt reusable rocket technology, significantly boost launch frequency, boost cost competitiveness, and keep open lines of communication with commercial clients in order to go forward. Despite the strategic preference for indigenous launch services, Indian space businesses will continue to select SpaceX and other foreign providers in the absence of these modifications.
For India’s space industry, the current state of affairs poses both a challenge and an opportunity. Losing commercial clients to overseas rivals is alarming, but it also emphasises how urgently institutional changes are required, which could eventually improve India’s standing in the world space economy.
