ISRO is on the cusp of opening up Indian space research to academia, private players, researchers and students. With loads of ambitious space missions in pipeline starting with Gaganyaan – the first Human spaceflight programme scheduled to launch in 2022, ISRO has taken up a giant leap in setting up six Space Technology Incubation Centres (S-TIC) across the country. The first one has been inaugurated at National Institute of Technology, Agartala, Tripura.
S-TIC is being setup with a vision to provide research assistance, seed funding and infrastructure support to potential startups, research graduates and students to help ISRO with its ongoing and future space missions. The incubatees will be nurtured and / or exposed to challenges that ISRO is trying to overcome through technology solutions and proof of concepts. The solutions are then validated and mission qualified through the existing facilities of ISRO across the country. Once the prototypes are mission qualified, ISRO would induct them in the on-going projects through buy-back arrangements.
Incubation centres would be setup in Jalandhar, Bhubaneswar, Nagpur, Indore and Trichy with at a budget of Rs.2 Crore each.