Context For six decades, India's relationship with space was singular in its clarity — ISRO carried the nation's ambitions on government budgets, delivered missions of extraordinary cost-efficiency, and asked little of the private sector in return. That model built credibility. Chandrayaan-3's soft landing at the lunar South Pole in 2023 and the Mars Orbiter Mission completed at a fraction of NASA's comparable costs demonstrated what a focused, frugal engineering culture coul