💥Join UPSC 2027,2028 Mentorship (August Batch) + XFactor Notes & Microthemes PDF
Talk to Mentor

Civilsdaily

Login

GS Paper: GS3-17.Awareness in the fields of IT, Space, Computers, Robotics, Nano-technology, Bio-technology and issues relating to Intellectual Property Rights.

  • Gene Editing’s Bold Move: Permanently Shut Down PCSK9

    Why in the News

    VERVE-102, an experimental in vivo base editing therapy delivered as a single intravenous infusion, permanently switches off the PCSK9 gene inside liver cells and cut LDL cholesterol by about 62 percent in a phase 1 trial. Cholesterol control has until now been a lifelong compliance problem, and a one time genetic change replaces that problem with a permanent, irreversible one.

    How does VERVE-102 work?

    1. What it is: VERVE-102 is not a traditional drug. It is a form of in vivo gene editing, meaning the editing is done inside the patient’s body rather than on cells removed and returned.
    2. Step 1, delivery: Genetic instructions are delivered through a single intravenous infusion.
    3. Step 2, the edit: Those instructions make a one time targeted change to the DNA inside liver cells, altering a single base in the PCSK9 gene.
    4. Step 3, the effect: The edited liver cells permanently lose the ability to produce PCSK9.
    5. Step 4, the outcome: With PCSK9 production switched off, the liver clears more LDL cholesterol from the blood, and the effect persists without repeat dosing.
    6. The stated goal: A single infusion that permanently reduces the liver’s ability to produce PCSK9, so that a one and done cholesterol treatment could eventually replace conventional medicines.

    What is LDL cholesterol?

    1. Definition: LDL (low-density lipoprotein) is called bad cholesterol because high levels make it stick to artery walls and form hard fatty deposits called plaque.
    2. Why it matters: These deposits narrow the arteries and block blood flow, which raises the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

    What is PCSK9 and why is it the target?

    1. What it is: PCSK9 is a protein involved in regulating LDL cholesterol in the blood.
    2. The natural experiment: People who naturally carry certain loss-of-function changes in the PCSK9 gene have lower LDL cholesterol throughout their lives and a lower risk of coronary heart disease.
    3. The inference: Reducing PCSK9 activity is therefore a safe and effective route to lowering cardiovascular risk.
    4. Confirmed by drugs: PCSK9 monoclonal antibodies substantially reduce LDL cholesterol and cardiovascular events, confirming the target.
    5. The limitation VERVE-102 addresses: Traditional medicines temporarily block PCSK9 or reduce its production, so their effects require continued treatment.

    What did the phase 1 trial find?

    1. LDL reduction: LDL cholesterol fell by about 62 percent in the highest dose group after four weeks.
    2. PCSK9 reduction: PCSK9 levels in that group fell by about 88 percent.
    3. Absolute fall: LDL cholesterol decreased by approximately 78 mg/dL on average.
    4. Follow up length: Some participants were followed for at least one year, and the longest follow up reached 18 months.
    5. Durability so far: The reductions in PCSK9 and LDL cholesterol were relatively stable across that period.

    How much cardiovascular risk does that reduction translate into?

    1. The established ratio: For every 1 mmol/L reduction in LDL cholesterol, cardiovascular risk falls by 20 to 22 percent.
    2. Worked case: An LDL cholesterol of 4.0 mmol/L, approximately 155 mg/dL, falling to 1.6 mmol/L is a 60 percent reduction.
    3. Effect of that case: That fall halves the patient’s cardiovascular risk.
    4. What remains unproven: VERVE-102 has not yet been shown to prevent heart attacks or strokes directly.
    5. The supporting evidence: All cholesterol lowering trials so far have shown that lower cholesterol means fewer cardiovascular events, and drugs blocking the PCSK9 protein have been shown to reduce heart attacks.

    How does it compare with the treatments already in use?

    1. Statins: Usually the foundation of treatment. They are relatively inexpensive, widely available, and supported by extensive evidence showing reductions in cardiovascular events.
    2. Ezetimibe: A cholesterol absorption inhibitor, taken orally, that works by blocking cholesterol from being absorbed in the small intestine.
    3. PCSK9 antibody medicines: They produce powerful LDL reductions and have demonstrated cardiovascular benefits, but require repeated injections.
    4. Inclisiran: It reduces PCSK9 production and can lower LDL cholesterol by roughly 50 percent, with less frequent dosing that makes long term treatment easier. It does not permanently modify DNA.
    5. The distinguishing feature of VERVE-102: Every existing option acts temporarily and must be continued. VERVE-102 makes a permanent change to DNA.

    Does permanence justify the loss of reversibility?

    1. The compliance case: Repeat prescriptions and remembering daily doses are a standing burden, and a safe one time treatment would remove that burden entirely.
    2. The unknown: This is a permanent change and the long term consequences are not yet known, so treated patients will need close observation.
    3. The reassurance from biology: Naturally occurring loss-of-function mutations of the gene exist, and people carrying them have less heart disease and live longer, which is the basis for the trial.
    4. The evidence horizon problem: An 18 month period is very different from proving that an effect will last for decades, and that requires further research.
    5. The current standing of the therapy: It is a potential future option for selected high risk patients, not a replacement for statins, ezetimibe, PCSK9 inhibitors or inclisiran.
    6. Trial breadth: More diverse trials are needed to establish whether the effect holds across populations over decades.

    Who would be considered for it first?

    1. Familial hypercholesterolemia: An inherited condition producing very high LDL cholesterol from birth, whose patients have the most to gain from a permanent reduction.
    2. Very high cardiovascular risk patients: Those whose risk is not controlled by existing therapy would be the second group.
    3. The staging logic: Beginning with these groups allows observation for problems before any wider use.
    4. What it is not yet: It is not a population level cholesterol intervention and is not positioned as one.

    Challenges to VERVE-102

    1. Irreversibility of a permanent edit: A therapy that cannot be stopped removes the physician’s ability to withdraw treatment, e.g. a statin prescription can be discontinued the day an adverse effect appears, while an edited liver cell population cannot be restored.
    2. Evidence horizon is short: Durability is established only to 18 months, e.g. statin cardiovascular outcome evidence rests on trials such as the Heart Protection Study that ran over five years in more than 20,000 participants.
    3. Delivery vector and off target risk: Gene therapy delivery carries historical safety precedent, e.g. the 1999 death of a participant in an adenoviral vector gene therapy trial in the United States halted the field for years.
    4. Cost and access: One time genetic therapies have been priced far beyond public health budgets, e.g. Casgevy, the first approved CRISPR based therapy, is priced at over two million dollars per patient in the United States.
    5. Population applicability: Early phase cohorts do not establish effect across differing lipid profiles, e.g. coronary artery disease in South Asians presents roughly a decade earlier and at lower body mass index than in western populations.
    6. Regulatory pathway for permanent somatic edits: Approval frameworks for irreversible somatic edits are still forming, e.g. India’s National Guidelines for Gene Therapy Product Development and Clinical Trials, 2019 permit somatic editing under review but bar germline editing outright.
    7. The competing benchmark is already cheap: A one time therapy must justify a large upfront price against an existing generic, e.g. statins cost a few rupees a day in India and are on the National List of Essential Medicines.

    Conclusion

    The central finding is that a permanent genetic switch off of PCSK9 through a single infusion produces LDL reductions larger than any daily medicine achieves, and that the reduction has held for 18 months. What remains unresolved is whether a permanent change is safe across a lifetime, and whether the LDL reduction converts into fewer heart attacks and strokes, neither of which the phase 1 data can answer. Until large outcome trials report, the therapy stands as an option for familial hypercholesterolemia and very high risk patients rather than a replacement for statins, ezetimibe, PCSK9 inhibitors or inclisiran.

    PYQ Relevance:

    Question (2021, GS3): “What are the research and developmental achievements in applied biotechnology? How will these achievements help to uplift the poorer sections of society?
    Linkage: Applied biotechnology is the primary field where gene editing techniques (like CRISPR) are developed to address challenges in health and agriculture, which can specifically benefit the underprivileged

  • [18th August 2026] The Hindu OpED: Match AI models to workloads, not leaderboards

    PYQ Relevance
    Question (2024, GS4): “The application of Artificial Intelligence as a dependable source of input for administrative rational decision-making is a debatable issue. Critically examine the statement from the ethical point of view”
    Linkage: Administrative tasks require balancing capability with governance. The article  argue that leaderboards measure capability on standard tasks but fail to predict production quality or address the ethical/safety guardrails needed for specific organizational workloads

    Why in the News

    A new artificial intelligence (AI) release claims the top of some leaderboard almost every week, and enterprises that once simply consumed the strongest available model through a managed interface now face a harder choice. What determines success is no longer which model scores highest but which model and which deployment approach fit a particular workload, with cost, governance, data residency and intellectual property protection now sitting alongside raw capability. A security incident in July 2026 made the point concrete, when a frontier model’s own safety controls blocked the forensic work and the investigation had to be completed on a self hosted model.

    What are open weight models?

    1. What they are: Models whose trained weights are released so that an organisation can download and run them on its own infrastructure, subject to the licence terms.
    2. How they differ from closed models: A closed model is delivered as a remote service, and the organisation never holds the parameters that do the computation.
    3. The data effect: Sensitive data can remain inside approved environments rather than being transmitted to an external provider.
    4. The customisation effect: Models can be fine tuned on proprietary knowledge without routinely sending that knowledge to an external provider.
    5. The commercial effect: Enterprises gain greater portability, reduce dependence on any single vendor’s road map and pricing, and often see substantially lower per token costs.
    6. The important qualification: Total cost of ownership still depends heavily on utilisation and scale, so the lower unit price does not automatically mean a lower bill.

    What is a frontier model?

    1. What it is: The most capable general purpose model a leading laboratory currently offers, delivered as a remote service through a commercial interface.
    2. Where it fits: Customer facing tasks that demand the highest reasoning capability often belong on these closed services.

    What is data residency?

    1. What it is: A requirement that data be stored and processed within a specified national or legal jurisdiction.
    2. Why it drives deployment choice: A regulated workload subject to a residency obligation cannot be served by a model hosted outside that jurisdiction, whatever its benchmark score.

    What is token sovereignty?

    1. What it is: The objective of having artificial intelligence computation for a country’s users performed on infrastructure located and governed within that country.
    2. What the term refers to: A token is the unit in which model input and output are measured and billed, so sovereignty over tokens means sovereignty over where inference actually runs.

    What is managed inference?

    1. What it is: A service that hosts open weight models on controlled infrastructure and exposes them to customers through managed endpoints.
    2. What it removes: The customer gets data residency and fine tuning flexibility without having to build and operate the underlying graphics processing unit clusters and the inference serving stack.

    What is fine tuning?

    1. What it is: Further training of an already trained model on an organisation’s own data so that it performs better on that organisation’s specific tasks.
    2. Why it raises a control question: Fine tuning on proprietary knowledge means that knowledge must be exposed to whoever controls the training environment.

    What are safety guardrails?

    1. What they are: Controls built into a model service that refuse categories of request judged harmful, applied before the model responds.
    2. Their structural limitation: They operate on the content of the request, so they cannot distinguish an authorised security responder from an attacker submitting the same material.

    Why has model ranking stopped being the deciding factor?

    1. The churn problem: A new release claims the top of some leaderboard almost every week, so a ranking based decision is obsolete within weeks.
    2. The old default: Until recently most enterprises simply chose the strongest available model and consumed it through managed interfaces from the frontier laboratories.
    3. What now sits alongside capability: Cost, governance, data residency, intellectual property protection and operational complexity are now first order considerations, not secondary ones.
    4. The reframed question: The question is not which model scores highest but which model and which deployment approach are right for a particular workload.
    5. What a benchmark cannot capture: A leaderboard measures capability on a standard task set and says nothing about where the data goes or what the workload costs at production volume.
    6. The decision level: The call belongs at the level of the individual workload rather than at the level of a single corporate standard.

    What did the July 2026 security incident demonstrate?

    1. The trigger: An AI driven intrusion hit the infrastructure of a major model hosting company in July 2026.
    2. The first response: Incident responders first turned to frontier models behind commercial interfaces to analyse thousands of attacker actions.
    3. What the forensic work required: Feeding real exploit payloads, attack logs and command and control artifacts to the models.
    4. What blocked it: The providers’ safety guardrails blocked the requests, because the systems could not distinguish an authorised responder from an attacker.
    5. How it was resolved: The company completed the analysis on a self hosted open weight model instead.
    6. The data consequence: Sensitive incident data stayed inside its own environment throughout that analysis.
    7. The correct reading: The lesson was not that closed models are inferior, it was that some workloads structurally require a model the organisation controls.
    8. The class of affected work: Security forensics, malware analysis and any investigation that must examine genuine attacker tooling cannot tolerate third party guardrails that refuse the query.
    9. The preparedness point: A capable, vetted open weight model must already be running on infrastructure the organisation governs before an incident occurs, not after.

    Why can one deployment strategy not serve every workload?

    1. The basic fact: Very few organisations have only one artificial intelligence workload.
    2. Banking against marketing: A bank analysing confidential customer data has different requirements from a marketing team generating campaign content.
    3. Manufacturing against cyber security: A manufacturer embedding AI in customer service has different priorities from a cyber security team examining malware.
    4. The control axis: Enterprises must classify workloads by control requirements as rigorously as by performance needs.
    5. What the classification decides: The control requirement, not the capability score, is what determines whether a workload can sit on a remote service at all.
    6. The realism check: Expecting one model and one deployment strategy to fit every use case is increasingly unrealistic.

    Why are open weights not a free option?

    1. The easy part: Downloading a model is the easy part of the exercise.
    2. What operation actually needs: Running it reliably at enterprise scale requires graphics processing unit infrastructure, inference serving, monitoring, security, governance, upgrades and licensing.
    3. The trade stated plainly: Greater control comes with greater responsibility.
    4. Where the trade works: For large organisations with deep engineering capacity the trade off can be worthwhile.
    5. Where it does not: For most mid sized and small enterprises it is far more challenging.
    6. The cost qualification: Lower per token cost does not settle the question, because total cost of ownership depends on utilisation and scale.

    What is the third deployment option now emerging?

    1. What it is: Managed inference platforms for open weight models, which host leading open weight families on controlled infrastructure and expose them through managed endpoints.
    2. What the enterprise gets: Many of the benefits of open weights, namely data residency, fine tuning flexibility and often lower cost.
    3. What the enterprise avoids: Building and operating the underlying graphics processing unit clusters and the inference stack.
    4. The Indian example: Sarvam Inference, an India hosted managed service unveiled at a 2026 conference, is one concrete instance of the category taking shape.
    5. What it serves: The platform currently serves a 105 billion parameter domestic model alongside leading open weight families such as GLM 5.2 and Gemma 4, all running on domestic infrastructure.
    6. Where the significance lies: The significance is not any individual model, since enterprises could already download many of them.
    7. The actual problem solved: The challenge was making them work reliably in production, which means handling concurrency, latency, security and continuous updates at scale.
    8. The access effect: Production grade endpoints under Indian data residency are likely to democratise access for companies that could never justify specialised AI operations teams.
    9. The policy effect: It supports the broader push for token sovereignty.

    Where does the case for control run into its own limit?

    1. The caveat stated: Managed open weight platforms reintroduce vendor dependence.
    2. Where the dependence moves to: It shifts from the model layer to the infrastructure layer, and it does not disappear.
    3. What must therefore be tested: Enterprises should evaluate portability guarantees, security posture, pricing trajectory and exit paths.
    4. The standard to apply: The same rigour applied to any frontier interface contract must be applied to the managed open weight provider.
    5. Why this is the real tension: The reason to leave a closed provider was concentration risk, and the managed route recreates that risk one layer down.
    6. What it does not undo: Data residency and the ability to run forensic workloads are genuinely gained, so the answer is a different contract, not a return to the closed default.

    What do sovereign artificial intelligence efforts elsewhere show?

    1. European Union: The AI Act, adopted in 2024, is the first comprehensive horizontal law on artificial intelligence, and it classifies systems by risk tier with obligations attached to each.
    2. European Union infrastructure: The GAIA-X initiative was created to build a federated European cloud and data infrastructure with defined residency and portability rules.
    3. France: A domestic laboratory has built and released open weight model families, which is the European route to reducing dependence on United States providers.
    4. United Arab Emirates: The Falcon open weight model family was released by a state backed research institute as a deliberate sovereign capability investment.
    5. China: Several Chinese laboratories release strong open weight models, and the GLM family named in this discussion is one of them, which is how open weights have become geopolitically distributed rather than concentrated.
    6. Japan and South Korea: Both have funded national language model programmes on domestic compute, on the same reasoning of language coverage and residency.
    7. What the pattern demonstrates: Sovereignty efforts everywhere target the infrastructure and weights layer rather than benchmark leadership, which is the same shift the enterprise level argument describes.

    How should a workload be matched to a deployment model?

    1. Customer facing reasoning tasks: Tasks demanding frontier reasoning often fit closed interfaces from the leading laboratories.
    2. Regulated workloads: Workloads with strict data residency obligations frequently suit managed open weight platforms hosted in country.
    3. Security and intellectual property work: Security forensics, malware analysis and intellectual property critical fine tuning usually belong on self hosted deployments.
    4. The discipline required: The call must be made workload by workload rather than by corporate default.
    5. What the organisation must understand: The strengths, limitations and economics of each approach, so the match is made on evidence rather than on habit.
    6. The balance being struck: Every workload should go to the option delivering the right balance of capability, control, cost and governance.
    7. The organisational conclusion: Deployment choice is a core architectural decision, not a procurement afterthought.

    Challenges to workload based artificial intelligence deployment

    1. Absence of a workload classification discipline: Most enterprises have no register of which workloads carry control obligations, so the match cannot be made. e.g. regulated entities discovering only during an audit that customer data was processed through an overseas endpoint.
    2. Graphics processing unit scarcity and cost: Self hosting requires accelerator capacity that is expensive and supply constrained. e.g. the IndiaAI Mission’s empanelment of compute providers to make subsidised graphics processing units available because market capacity was insufficient.
    3. Licence ambiguity in open weights: Open weight licences often restrict commercial use or downstream redistribution, which is discovered late. e.g. community licences that cap monthly active users or bar use in training competing models.
    4. Guardrail rigidity in legitimate work: Safety controls block authorised security and medical work because they judge content, not authorisation. e.g. the July 2026 forensic analysis that had to be moved to a self hosted model.
    5. Skills concentration: Inference serving, quantisation and model operations skills sit in a small number of firms. e.g. mid sized enterprises unable to staff a dedicated AI operations team and therefore defaulting to a single vendor.
    6. Model supply chain risk: Downloaded weights and their dependencies can carry tampered artifacts. e.g. malicious serialised model files uploaded to public model hubs and later removed.
    7. Evaluation gap: Public benchmarks do not measure performance on an enterprise’s own tasks, so a leaderboard rank does not predict production quality. e.g. contamination of benchmark test sets in model training data inflating reported scores.
    8. Cross border transfer restrictions: Data protection law limits where personal data may be processed, which constrains model choice. e.g. restrictions on transfer of personal data to notified countries under India’s data protection statute.
    9. Vendor lock in at the infrastructure layer: A managed provider’s proprietary serving stack and pricing can be as sticky as a closed model contract. e.g. fine tuned model artefacts that cannot be exported and rehosted elsewhere.

    Way Forward

    • Invest in AI skills and secure open-weight ecosystems covering inference serving, model evaluation, quantisation, monitoring and supply-chain security.
    • Adopt workload-based AI deployment by matching each use case with the right balance of capability, cost, control and governance.
    • Build domestic AI infrastructure including GPU capacity, managed inference platforms and secure data centres to strengthen token sovereignty.
    • Strengthen AI governance through clear workload classification, data residency rules, licensing checks and security standards.
    • Develop hybrid and portable architectures to avoid dependence on a single model or infrastructure provider, with clear exit and portability provisions.

  • NASA’s Moon Base: What India will gain by joining

    Why in the News

    The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has invited the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to join its Moon Base programme, a permanent crewed research station to be built on the Moon in stages. The invitation forces a choice between building an independent human spaceflight, space station and lunar landing capability at national cost, and acquiring the same capability faster inside a programme the United States leads. India signed the Artemis Accords in 2023 as the 27th nation, so the diplomatic ground for joining is already laid.

    What is the NASA Moon Base programme?

    1. What it is: A permanent research station on the lunar surface that astronauts and robots can inhabit for prolonged periods.
    2. What it is for: It is meant to facilitate research and to allow exploration and exploitation of lunar resources.
    3. How it is built: The base is assembled in stages over several years, requiring repeated crewed and robotic trips to the Moon.
    4. Its scale: In scale and ambition it compares only with the Apollo missions, and it could be the costliest scientific project ever undertaken.
    5. Its engineering claim: It will possibly be the most challenging engineering exercise ever attempted by humanity.
    6. Its delivery model: NASA will not execute it alone and is seeking partners in both the international community and private industry.

    What is the Bharat Antariksh Station?

    1. What it is: India’s planned indigenous space station, to be built and operated by ISRO as a crewed orbital facility.
    2. Why it is cited here: ISRO must hold the technology to build such infrastructure, and India is unlikely within about a decade to have a scientific ecosystem needing an entire station for its own use all year round.

    What is the lunar South Pole?

    1. What it is: The polar region of the Moon holding permanently shadowed craters where water ice is expected to survive.
    2. Why it is the target: Phase One of the Moon Base programme sends robotic missions specifically to the South Pole, because water ice can be converted into drinking water, breathable oxygen and rocket propellant.

    What are interoperable systems?

    1. What they are: Common standards and hardware interfaces that let equipment built by different countries connect and work together in space.
    2. What the Accords require: Signatories emphasise interoperability in fuel storage, landing structures, communications systems and power systems, which is a light obligation for ISRO because it is only beginning to develop these systems.

    What is deglobalisation?

    1. What it is: The retreat from shared international supply chains towards national self reliance in a strategic technology.
    2. Where it currently applies: Semiconductors, clean energy and artificial intelligence, where supply chains and resources are controlled by a small set of actors.

    What are the three phases of the Moon Base programme?

    1. Phase One, now to 2029: Focus on gaining reliable access to the lunar surface and building a deeper understanding of the environment.
    2. Phase One activity: Robotic missions will explore the lunar South Pole, demonstrate new technologies and gather the knowledge needed to guide future development.
    3. Phase Two, 2029 to 2032: NASA will begin deploying the first infrastructure needed to support long term operations on the Moon.
    4. Phase Two systems: Early power systems, cargo transportation, logistics and communications capabilities will expand the human footprint and enable increasingly complex missions.
    5. Phase Three, 2032 and beyond: NASA will begin assembling a permanent lunar outpost where astronauts can live and work for extended periods.
    6. Phase Three systems: Habitats, power systems, communications, transportation and other critical capabilities will support an enduring human presence.

    Why is NASA seeking partners instead of building the base alone?

    1. Budget compression: NASA’s budget has been cut significantly under the current US administration, so a solo build is not affordable.
    2. Shift of manufacturing: Most of NASA’s hardware production now happens in the private sector rather than in house.
    3. Two partner pools: It is seeking collaboration both from the international community and from private industry.
    4. A ready pool of states: The 70 countries that signed the Artemis Accords have already signalled a willingness to join such a collaboration.
    5. Cost of the mission profile: Repeated crewed and robotic trips to the Moon over several years put the cost beyond a single agency’s programme line.
    6. Precedent: The International Space Station established that a permanent crewed facility is built and run as shared infrastructure, not as one nation’s asset.

    Why can ISRO not sustain its lunar and station ambitions on its own?

    1. Three simultaneous programmes: ISRO is running an independent human spaceflight programme, a Moon landing programme and a full fledged space station programme in parallel.
    2. Capability against sustainability: Holding these capabilities is important, and running them sustainably on India’s own scientific and economic base is a separate question.
    3. The demand problem: India is unlikely, within about a decade, to have a scientific ecosystem hungry enough to occupy an entire space station all year round.
    4. The cost of lunar exploration: A separate full fledged lunar exploration programme carries costs that are prohibitive even for the world’s richest economy.
    5. Competing national goals: India is chasing multiple parallel goals on the path to prosperity, which limits how much can be allocated to space at the scale required.
    6. The shared infrastructure conclusion: The Bharat Antariksh Station will have to be shared infrastructure on the model of the International Space Station.

    What does ISRO gain by joining the Moon Base programme?

    1. Mission management experience: Participation gives ISRO experience in planning and executing complex missions of exactly the type it intends to run itself.
    2. Technology leapfrog: It allows ISRO to skip development stages rather than rebuild capability that already exists elsewhere.
    3. The obsolescence clock: Space exploration has reached a stage where a 10 year gap in technology development can leave a nation well behind.
    4. Avoiding duplication: There is no economic sense in reinventing capability that a partner already holds.
    5. Timeline compression: Cooperation with the United States lets ISRO fast track its own project timelines and reach the frontiers of technology development.
    6. Spin off benefits: The collaboration can generate spin off technologies with cascading dividends across sectors beyond space.
    7. No exclusivity cost: Signing the Accords or joining the Moon Base effort does not prevent India from continuing its long standing space cooperation with Russia.

    What do the positions of other space powers reveal about the Accords?

    1. Japan: A signatory and a major space faring nation, contributing habitation and pressurised rover work to the Artemis effort.
    2. South Korea: A signatory that has built an independent lunar capability, having placed the Danuri orbiter around the Moon in 2022.
    3. Israel: A signatory whose Beresheet lander attempt in 2019 made it one of the few states to have reached lunar orbit.
    4. European states: Several are signatories, and the European Space Agency separately supplies the service module for NASA’s Orion crew vehicle.
    5. Russia: Not a signatory, and it is attempting a comparable lunar effort through its own partnership.
    6. China: Not a signatory, and it is pursuing the same objective with Russia rather than through the Accords.
    7. What the split demonstrates: The absence of the two other major space powers is what gives the criticism of a US led camp its credibility.

    Are the Artemis Accords a US led bloc that bypasses multilateral arrangements?

    1. The formal position: The Accords are a set of principles and good practices that countries agree to follow in their space activities.
    2. The criticism: They are increasingly seen as a US led camp writing its own rules for space exploration and the use of extraterrestrial resources, subtly bypassing international multilateral arrangements.
    3. What lends the criticism weight: Russia and China, the two other major space powers, are outside the grouping.
    4. India’s historical reluctance: India has traditionally been extremely reluctant to join any such grouping, and it still joined as an early signatory, the 27th nation, in 2023.
    5. The counter argument, no exclusion: Space is not adversarial at present, and a US landing on the Moon does not give it control over the area or its resources.
    6. The counter argument, no scarcity: The Moon is large enough and its resources abundant enough to support the efforts of all parties in the foreseeable future.
    7. The counter argument, no supply chain lock: There is no domination of supply chains or control over resources in space, so the deglobalisation trend seen in semiconductors, clean energy and artificial intelligence does not transfer to this case.
    8. The residual risk: The real exposure is technological, not geopolitical, and it is the possibility of ISRO getting locked into the US technology ecosystem to the extent of overdependence.

    Challenges to India joining the Moon Base programme

    1. Technology ecosystem overdependence: Deep integration with one partner’s standards makes later substitution expensive. e.g. India’s dependence on Russian cryogenic engine technology in the 1990s stalled the GSLV programme for over a decade after the Missile Technology Control Regime pressure on the transfer.
    2. Programme discipline slipping: Collaboration can crowd out ISRO’s own milestones if targets are not separately protected. e.g. the Gaganyaan crewed flight has already moved from its original 2022 target to the later part of this decade.
    3. Export control friction: Dual use hardware transfers remain governed by US licensing that can be withheld. e.g. International Traffic in Arms Regulations clearances have historically delayed satellite component supplies to Indian entities.
    4. Budget asymmetry: India’s civil space spending is a small fraction of NASA’s, which limits its bargaining position on workshare. e.g. the Department of Space’s annual budget is of the order of Rs 13,000 crore against a NASA budget many times larger.
    5. Launch reliability: A partner role demands schedule certainty that India’s recent launch record does not yet demonstrate. e.g. three of the six ISRO missions in 2025 and 2026 failed to place satellites in the intended orbits.
    6. Balancing the Russia relationship: Deeper alignment with the Accords sits alongside a long standing space partnership that must be maintained separately. e.g. Russian support for the crew module and life support work under the Gaganyaan programme, including astronaut training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre.
    7. Unsettled resource law: The Accords permit extraction and use of space resources, and that reading of the Outer Space Treaty is contested. e.g. the Moon Agreement of 1979 treats lunar resources as the common heritage of mankind and has been ratified by very few states.
    8. Volatile bilateral politics: The India United States relationship has been unstable in the last two years, which is a risk for a multi decade commitment. e.g. trade and tariff disputes running alongside this civil space engagement.

    Conclusion

    The Moon Base invitation converts an abstract question about strategic autonomy into a concrete question about economic sustainability. India can build the technology for a station and a lunar landing on its own, and it is unlikely to be able to run either sustainably at national scale, which is why joining offers a genuine leapfrog rather than a compromise. The condition that must hold is that ISRO protects its own targets and avoids locking itself into a single technology ecosystem while it collaborates.

    “[2025] Consider the following space missions:
    I. Axiom-4
    II. SpaDeX
    III. Gaganyaan
    How many of the space missions given above encourage and support microgravity research?
    (a) Only one
    (b) Only two
    (c) All the three
    (d) None

  • GISAT-1A take-off in September to end ISRO’s seven-month operational hiatus

    Why in the News

    The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is set to resume launches in the first week of September 2026 with GISAT 1A, after a seven month operational pause.

    The pause followed multiple mission failures and has affected NavIC, which currently has only 3 operational satellites, against the 4 required for basic standalone positioning.

    What is GISAT 1A?

    • GISAT: Geo Imaging Satellite
    • Also designated EOS 05.
    • Earth observation satellite with a 10-year mission life.
    • Provides frequent imaging of large areas.
    • Applications include disaster monitoring, agriculture and forestry.
    • It replaces GISAT 1 / EOS 03, which failed to reach orbit in 2021.

    What is NavIC?

    • NavIC: Navigation with Indian Constellation
    • Formerly called IRNSS: Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System.
      • Developed by ISRO.
      • Provides Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) services.
      • Covers India and surrounding regions.
      • Reduces dependence on foreign navigation systems.
      • Currently operational: IRNSS 1B, IRNSS 1I and NVS 01.

    Why are 4 Satellites Needed?

    • Positioning requires signals from at least 4 satellites to determine:
      • Three-dimensional position
      • Receiver clock error
    • With only 3 satellites, NavIC cannot provide standalone positioning, though its timing service remains functional.

    What is PNT?

    • Positioning: Determines location.
    • Navigation: Determines movement and route.
    • Timing: Provides precise time reference.

    Why Did ISRO’s Launch Calendar Stall?

    Three of six missions during 2025 and 2026 failed to achieve their intended objectives:

    • PSLV C61 / EOS 9: Third-stage anomaly.
    • PSLV C62 / EOS N1: Third-stage anomaly in January 2026.
    • GSLV F15 / NVS 02: Orbit-raising manoeuvres failed.
      • Failure analysis reports for these missions have not been made public.

    What Comes Next?

    • September 2026: GISAT 1A
    • November 2026: NVS 03
    • NVS 03 is expected to restore NavIC to the 4-satellite minimum for standalone positioning.
    • Meanwhile, Indian armed forces continue using NavIC alongside GPS, Galileo and GLONASS.

    “[2018] With reference to the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), consider the following statements :
    1. IRNSS has three satellites in geostationary and four satellites in geosynchronous orbits.
    2. IRNSS covers entire India and about 5500 sq. km beyond its borders.
    3. India will have its own satellite navigation system with full global coverage by the middle of 2019.
    Which of the statements given above is/are correct ?
    (a) 1 only
    (b) 1 and 2 only
    (c) 2 and 3 only
    (d) None
    Answer: (a)”

  • Claude AI Gets Global Watermarks to Prove What’s AI-Generated

    Why in the News

    Content generated by Claude will carry a machine readable marking, after Anthropic signed the transparency Code of Practice under Article 50(2) of the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act. The change extends watermarking from images and video to text itself, where the mark travels with copied text and detection is not reliable. The obligation arises from one regional law but the rollout is global.

    What is Anthropic’s new watermarking system?

    1. Trigger: The policy was introduced after Anthropic signed the EU AI Act’s Article 50(2) Code of Practice on Transparency of AI Generated Content.
    2. Two forms of marking: Watermarks are embedded in text content produced by Claude. Signed provenance metadata is attached to supported files in formats such as .svg, .png and .jpg.
    3. Applied at the model level: The text watermark is invisible to users. Anthropic has confirmed that it will not affect Claude’s response.
    4. Persistence: The watermark is part of the text, so it travels with the text when it is copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing.
    5. Coverage of surfaces: Output from the Claude Platform (API), Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Claude Tag is set to carry the embedded watermarks. The same applies when Claude models are accessed through AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry.
    6. Detection still incomplete: Anthropic is still working on letting external parties detect the markings, and the rollout announcement did not reveal full technical details.

    What is Article 50(2) of the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act?

    1. Substance: It requires providers of AI systems that generate synthetic text, audio, image or video to mark their outputs in a machine readable format and make them detectable as artificially generated.
    2. Code of Practice route: Signing the associated Code of Practice is the voluntary compliance instrument through which providers demonstrate that they meet the transparency duty.

    What is signed provenance metadata?

    1. About: It is a cryptographically signed record attached to a file that states the file’s origin and the tool that produced it, so a later viewer can verify where it came from.
    2. Weak point: The record is stripped when the file format is converted, which breaks the chain of verification.

    Why does watermarking text change the stakes for ordinary users?

    1. Everyday written work is now in scope: Professional emails, personal messages, school assignments and workplace deliverables that could once pass as human made may carry an AI watermark.
    2. Marginal AI involvement still marks the file: The mark can attach even where Claude’s involvement was close to negligible.
    3. Second hand exposure: A human made file that is proofread, translated, summarised or converted by someone else using Claude can still carry a mark in the final output.
    4. Non users are exposed: A person who never uses the tool can end up holding marked text produced by a collaborator, which has put non users on edge alongside users.
    5. Workflow effect: Millions of customers are reconsidering their use of AI tools and debating at what point human content becomes AI content.

    Why does the mark not settle the question of authorship?

    1. Both error types admitted: Detecting a Claude mark does not confirm that the work was created by AI. The absence of a mark does not confirm that the work was fully human made.
    2. Short text: Short text lengths can throw off the result, since a watermark needs sufficient text to be carried.
    3. Post processing edits: Content changes made after Claude processed the text can degrade the signal.
    4. Format conversion: Metadata is stripped when a file format is converted, removing the provenance record for images and documents.
    5. Unsupported surfaces: Use of a Claude offering that does not yet support AI marking leaves the output unmarked.

    What new risks has the announcement itself created?

    1. A removal market: Multiple dubious websites offering watermark “removal” or “clean up” services came online within days of the announcement.
    2. A repeat of the detector cycle: The earlier rise of AI text detectors was followed by AI text humanisers built to deceive those same detectors.
    3. Reputational damage already recorded: Detector outputs have been involved in cases leading to cancelled book deals and social media trolling for authors and bloggers.
    4. Tool quality: AI text detection tools remain experimental, fallible and prone to errors, yet are treated as evidence.
    5. Credential risk: Users now face the prospect that their own tool damages their professional credentials.

    Why do watermarks work for images but not yet for text?

    1. Images and video are the solved case: Watermarks give regulators, fact checkers and journalists a reliable way to verify the origin of an image or video and trace it to a specific provider.
    2. Text is not: Accurately detecting AI generated text remains uncharted territory, so the same verification logic does not transfer.
    3. Circulation outruns labelling: AI generated content is circulated thousands of times on social media unchecked, as content moderation rules have been loosened across the Meta family of apps and X.
    4. Users do not look: The average internet user scrolling on a phone misses even visible AI watermarks, and an invisible mark is weaker still.
    5. Regulator dependence: A tangible reduction in misinformation and deepfakes requires technology providers and regulators to act together, not a marking standard alone.

    Challenges to AI content watermarking

    1. Adversarial removal: Paraphrasing, translation and dedicated stripping tools defeat statistical text watermarks. e.g. the removal and clean up websites that appeared within days of the Anthropic announcement.
    2. No interoperable standard across providers: A mark from one model tells nothing about content from another, so an unmarked file proves nothing. e.g. the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard is adopted by some providers and open source models remain outside it.
    3. False accusation of students and writers: Detector outputs are used as disciplinary evidence despite admitted error rates. e.g. OpenAI withdrew its own AI Text Classifier in July 2023 citing low accuracy.
    4. Open weight models cannot be compelled: A provider level obligation does not reach models that run on a user’s own machine. e.g. freely downloadable open weight models can generate unmarked text offline.
    5. Jurisdictional mismatch: A duty created by one region’s law governs the provider, not the harm suffered elsewhere. e.g. an Indian user injured by unmarked synthetic content depends on a European regulator’s enforcement.
    6. Labelling does not stop the harm: A deepfake remains persuasive even when correctly labelled, because the first viewing shapes belief. e.g. the November 2023 deepfake video of an Indian film actor circulated widely before any advisory was issued.

    Conclusion

    A transparency duty designed for synthetic images and video has been extended to text, where detection is unreliable and the mark attaches to work that may be substantially human. The result is a signal that users cannot see, verify or contest, carrying real reputational consequences. Labelling will reduce misinformation only if detection tools become accurate and platforms act on the marks, neither of which is settled.

    Artificial Intelligence Governance in India

    1. About: AI governance covers the rules on how AI systems are built, trained, deployed and labelled, and who is liable when they cause harm.
    2. No dedicated statute: India regulates AI through existing law and subordinate rules rather than a single AI Act, unlike the European Union’s risk tiered model.
    3. Scale: India has one of the largest AI talent pools and developer bases globally and is among the largest markets for consumer AI applications.
    4. Institutional anchor: The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is the nodal ministry, working through the IndiaAI Mission and advisories to intermediaries.
    5. Global positioning: India hosted the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February 2026, the successor to the AI Safety Summit series, and is a founding member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI).

    Laws and Rules Governing AI Generated Content in India

    1. Information Technology Act, 2000: The parent statute for electronic records, intermediary liability and cyber offences.
    2. Section 79 grants intermediaries safe harbour subject to due diligence, which is the hook for content labelling duties.
    3. Section 66D penalises cheating by personation using a computer resource, used against deepfake impersonation.
    4. Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021: Impose due diligence, grievance redress and takedown timelines on intermediaries and significant social media intermediaries.
    5. Amendment Rules on synthetically generated information, 2026: Require platforms to label synthetically generated information prominently and to obtain user declarations on whether uploaded content is synthetic.
    6. Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023: Governs processing of personal data, including data used to train and prompt AI models, with consent and purpose limitation duties.
    7. Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023: Covers forgery, defamation and obscenity offences that synthetic media can constitute.
    8. Copyright Act, 1957: Governs authorship and infringement questions raised by training data and machine generated output.

    Back2Basics: European Union Artificial Intelligence Act

    1. What it is: The world’s first comprehensive horizontal law on artificial intelligence, adopted by the European Union.
    2. Entry into force: 1 August 2024, with obligations applying in phases.
    3. Approach: A risk based classification into unacceptable risk, high risk, limited risk and minimal risk, with duties scaled to the tier.
    4. Prohibited practices: Social scoring by public authorities, untargeted scraping of facial images and manipulative techniques exploiting vulnerabilities.
    5. Article 50: Sets transparency obligations for AI systems that interact with people or generate synthetic content, including machine readable marking of outputs.
    6. Extraterritorial reach: It binds providers placing systems on the EU market irrespective of where they are established, which is why compliance measures are rolled out globally.

    Government Initiatives

    1. IndiaAI Mission: Approved in March 2024 with an outlay of about Rs 10,371.92 crore, built on seven pillars covering compute capacity, innovation centre, datasets platform, application development, future skills, startup financing and safe and trusted AI.
    2. Safe and Trusted AI pillar: Funds work on deepfake detection, algorithmic bias audits and AI governance frameworks, and underpins the proposed AI Safety Institute.
    3. National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, 2018: NITI Aayog’s framework identifying healthcare, agriculture, education, smart mobility and smart cities as focus sectors under the AI for All approach.
    4. Bhashini: The National Language Translation Mission building open speech and translation datasets across Indian languages.
    5. Responsible AI for Youth: A skilling programme for government school students to build AI literacy at scale.
    6. Digital India Act consultations: Proposed successor to the Information Technology Act, 2000, intended to address emerging technologies including AI and deepfakes.

    Key Facts about AI Content Provenance

    1. C2PA: The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity is the main cross industry technical standard for attaching tamper evident provenance to media files.
    2. SynthID: Google’s watermarking system for AI generated images, audio, video and text.
    3. Deepfake: Synthetic media in which a person’s likeness or voice is replaced or generated, typically using generative adversarial networks or diffusion models.
    4. Turing Test: The 1950 benchmark for machine indistinguishability from a human, now inverted by the problem of detecting machine authorship.
    5. GPAI: The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence was launched in June 2020 with India as a founding member, and India held its chair in 2024.

    Challenges in AI Governance in India

    1. No binding statutory framework: India governs AI through advisories and subordinate rules that carry weaker enforceability than a statute. e.g. the March 2024 MeitY advisory on under tested AI models was revised within weeks after industry objections.
    2. Compute dependence: Frontier model training depends on imported accelerators and foreign cloud capacity. e.g. the IndiaAI Mission empanelled over 18,000 graphics processing units in its first round in January 2025 to close this gap.
    3. Data protection enforcement capacity: The Data Protection Board must supervise a very large volume of processors with limited staff. e.g. the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 rules were notified only in November 2025, years after enactment.
    4. Copyright and training data disputes: Ownership of material used to train models is unresolved in Indian law. e.g. the news agency ANI’s suit against OpenAI in the Delhi High Court filed in November 2024.
    5. Election integrity: Synthetic audio and video can be deployed at scale during compressed campaign periods. e.g. AI generated voice clips of political leaders circulated during the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign.
    6. Algorithmic bias in public service delivery: Models trained on unrepresentative data misclassify beneficiaries. e.g. facial authentication failures for manual workers under Aadhaar based attendance systems.
    7. Skill and audit gap: India lacks a trained cadre of independent AI auditors to test high risk deployments. e.g. no statutory conformity assessment body exists comparable to the notified bodies under the EU AI Act.

    Way Forward

    1. Enact a risk tiered statute: Replace advisory based governance with a law that classifies AI uses by risk and fixes provider and deployer liability.
    2. Mandate interoperable provenance: Require adherence to a common content credential standard so a mark from one provider is readable by all platforms.
    3. Build public detection capacity: Fund an independent testing facility to benchmark deepfake and text detectors and publish accuracy rates.
    4. Protect against false accusation: Bar educational institutions and employers from acting on detector output alone, and require corroborating evidence.
    5. Expand sovereign compute: Scale domestic graphics processing unit capacity and public datasets so Indian models are not fully dependent on foreign infrastructure.
    6. Strengthen platform duties: Require prominent labelling at the point of display, not only in file metadata, and fix takedown timelines for unlabelled synthetic media.
    7. Invest in digital literacy: Run sustained public campaigns so users check provenance labels rather than react to content at first sight.

    “[2023, GS3, 10 marks] Introduce the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI). How does AI help clinical diagnosis? Do you perceive any threat to privacy of the individual in the use of AI in healthcare?”

  • Gaganyaan vs ISS: India’s Mission Is About Proving Indigenous Technology

    Why in the News

    The Indian astronaut who flew on Axiom Mission 4 has described Gaganyaan as a prototype mission built to prove technology, test systems and communicate with the ground, unlike the International Space Station flight, which was an established mission of experiments and return. The distinction separates having flown from owning the capability to fly. Axiom Space owned no hardware, while the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is building the capsule and the spacecraft in house.

    What is the Gaganyaan mission?

    1. About: It is India’s first human spaceflight programme, designed to carry a crew to low Earth orbit in an indigenously built crew module and return them safely.
    2. Nature of the mission: It is a prototype mission, focused on proving the technology, testing out systems and communicating with the ground, not on a defined experiment schedule.
    3. In house hardware: ISRO is building the capsule and the spacecraft in which the astronauts will travel, and launching Indian astronauts on an Indian vehicle.
    4. Engineering intensity: The work is described as heavy engineering, with robust processes and review mechanisms being set up around it.
    5. Status: The programme is scheduled over the next year or two, and preparation is currently ground based.

    What was Axiom Mission 4?

    1. About: It was a commercial crewed mission to the International Space Station, on which an Indian became only the second Indian in space and the first in over four decades.
    2. Duration: The Indian crew member spent 20 days at the International Space Station after a launch on 25 June.

    What is microgravity?

    1. About: It is the condition of near weightlessness experienced in orbit, where objects and fluids behave differently from how they behave on the ground.
    2. Why it matters for training: Microgravity cannot be simulated on the ground, so the environment is encountered fully only in flight.

    Why is the Axiom model not comparable to the Gaganyaan model?

    1. Axiom owned no hardware: Axiom Space is a private company coordinating missions to space and did not own any of the hardware used.
    2. Station ownership: The International Space Station is owned by NASA and its international partners, not by the mission coordinator.
    3. Vehicle ownership: The crew flew in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle, launched by the Falcon 9 rocket, both owned by SpaceX.
    4. ISRO’s position: India is attempting to make the hardware in house and launch its own astronauts in its own capsule, which is a different nature of work.
    5. Consequence: The two programmes cannot be compared, because one buys access to space and the other builds the means of access.

    What did India actually gain from the Axiom flight?

    1. Stated objective: The primary objective of the mission was to learn as much as possible and use that experience to enable India’s own mission.
    2. Observation team: An ISRO team was present alongside the astronaut to observe how operations were run.
    3. End to end exposure: The team witnessed the end to end execution of an entire crewed mission, from preparation to recovery.
    4. Ecosystem lesson: ISRO has launched many successful missions, but human spaceflight requires a different ecosystem, and the scale of operations was the biggest learning.
    5. Disciplines identified: The flight showed the range of disciplines India must address before sending people to space and bringing them back.

    Back2Basics: International Space Station

    1. What it is: The largest crewed structure in low Earth orbit, operated as a multinational research laboratory.
    2. First module: The Zarya module was launched in 1998, with continuous human occupation since November 2000.
    3. Partners: Five participating space agencies, NASA, Roscosmos, the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
    4. Orbit: It orbits at roughly 400 km altitude, completing an orbit in about 90 minutes and around 16 orbits a day.
    5. Function: It hosts microgravity research in biology, human physiology, materials science and Earth observation.
    6. Retirement: The station is planned for controlled deorbit around 2030 to 2031, which is driving commercial station projects.

    Government Initiatives

    1. Indian Space Policy, 2023: Opens the space sector to non government entities across the value chain and redefines the roles of ISRO, IN-SPACe and NSIL.
    2. IN-SPACe: The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre, a single window autonomous body that authorises and promotes private space activity.
    3. NewSpace India Limited (NSIL): The commercial arm of the Department of Space, handling technology transfer and demand driven satellite and launch missions.
    4. Gaganyaan Programme: Sanctioned in 2018 and later expanded in scope and outlay to include the first module of the Bharatiya Antariksh Station.
    5. Foreign Direct Investment reform, 2024: Liberalised FDI limits for satellite manufacturing, launch vehicles and ground segment components.
    6. SpaDeX: The Space Docking Experiment, which demonstrated autonomous docking of two Indian satellites, a prerequisite technology for a space station and crewed missions.

    Key Facts about India in Space

    1. First Indian in space: Flew aboard the Soviet Soyuz T-11 mission in 1984, spending about eight days aboard the Salyut 7 station.
    2. Second Indian in space: Flew on Axiom Mission 4 in 2025, over four decades after the first flight, spending 20 days at the International Space Station.
    3. ISRO: Established in 1969, headquartered in Bengaluru, functioning under the Department of Space.
    4. Chandrayaan 3: Made India the first country to soft land near the lunar south pole, in August 2023, with National Space Day observed on 23 August.
    5. Aditya L1: India’s first solar observatory, placed in a halo orbit around the Sun Earth Lagrange point L1.
    6. Private launch: India’s first privately built rocket flew a suborbital mission in November 2022, marking the entry of startups into launch services.

    “[2025] Consider the following space missions:
    I. Axiom-4
    II. SpaDeX
    III. Gaganyaan
    How many of the space missions given above encourage and support microgravity research?
    (a) Only one
    (b) Only two
    (c) All the three
    (d) None

  • India’s Next Giant Leap: Building a Base on the Moon

    Why in the News

    NASA invited ISRO at the ninth India United States Civil Space Joint Working Group meeting to join its Moon Base programme under the Artemis Accords, targeting a facility near the lunar south pole around 2030. A rival International Lunar Research Station led by China and Russia targets the same region by 2035. The tension is between the access a partnership offers and the interoperability standards that would extend terrestrial blocs onto the Moon.

    What is the Moon Base programme?

    1. About: Moon Base is the NASA led programme to establish a permanent crewed facility near the lunar south pole, operating under the Artemis Accords framework.
    2. Why the south pole: The region offers longer sunlight for power generation and permanently shadowed craters holding water ice.
    3. Target date: The facility is targeted for around 2030.
    4. Contracting model: Delivery is contracted to commercial providers rather than built entirely in house.

    What are the Artemis Accords?

    1. About: The Artemis Accords are a set of non binding principles for civil space exploration, covering transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, registration of objects, release of scientific data, preservation of heritage sites, deconfliction of activities and safe disposal of debris.
    2. Legal basis: They build on the Outer Space Treaty, 1967 rather than replacing it.
    3. India’s position: India signed the Accords in 2023.

    What is the International Lunar Research Station?

    1. About: The International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) is the China and Russia led lunar base programme announced in 2021.
    2. Location and timeline: It targets the lunar south pole, with a stated completion horizon of 2035.
    3. Participation: It counts 17 countries and organisations and more than 50 institutions.

    What contracts define the NASA programme’s shape?

    1. Terrain vehicles: Astrolab holds a $219 million contract and Lunar Outpost a $220 million contract for lunar terrain vehicles.
    2. Delivery services: Blue Origin holds $188 million in delivery task orders.
    3. Robotic missions: Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines together hold $600 million for four robotic missions.
    4. Programme restructuring: Under the current NASA leadership, Artemis III becomes a crewed Earth orbit test flight in 2027 and Artemis IV the first landing in 2028.
    5. Policy driver: The restructuring responds to the December 2025 United States space policy on cislunar space.

    Where does the partnership become a constraint?

    1. Exclusion clause: NASA excluded foreign entities with bilateral ties to China from a payload solicitation.
    2. Budget framing: The NASA financial year 2027 budget request frames Moon Base as establishing United States superiority on the Moon.
    3. Consequence for India: Deep integration could let United States objections constrain India’s independent cooperation choices.
    4. Foreclosure risk: Accepting exclusionary terms now would foreclose future cooperation with the ILRS.

    Why do interoperability standards decide the outcome?

    1. What standards fix: Docking interfaces, power connections, communication protocols and navigation references determine which hardware can work with which.
    2. Bloc formation mechanism: A closed standard makes participation conditional on political alignment, which transfers terrestrial blocs into cislunar space.
    3. Open standards alternative: Open international standards preserve sovereign control of hardware and software while permitting cooperation.
    4. India’s strategic interest: Strategic autonomy on the Moon depends on standards being open rather than on which partnership India joins.

    Challenges to India’s lunar ambitions

    1. Human spaceflight readiness: India has not yet flown a crewed mission. e.g. the Gaganyaan programme still in its uncrewed test flight phase.
    2. Heavy lift constraint: Lunar cargo delivery requires launch capacity beyond the current fleet. e.g. GSAT-N2 flown abroad because it exceeded LVM-3 capacity.
    3. Deep space communication: Sustained lunar operations need dedicated deep space network capacity. e.g. the Indian Deep Space Network at Byalalu operating a limited antenna set.
    4. Dual bloc pressure: Partnering with one programme invites exclusion from the other. e.g. the NASA payload solicitation barring entities with bilateral ties to China.
    5. Funding scale: India’s space budget is a fraction of the contracted value of individual NASA lunar task orders. e.g. $600 million contracted for four robotic missions against India’s annual space budget.
    6. Resource law vacuum: The Outer Space Treaty bars national appropriation but does not settle resource extraction rights. e.g. the contested legal status of the Artemis Accords safety zones.

    Conclusion

    The decisive question for India is not which lunar programme to join but whether interoperability standards stay open, since standards rather than treaties will determine who can operate with whom on the Moon. Joining Moon Base delivers access, and it carries the risk of inheriting an exclusion clause aimed at a third country. The next milestone is whether India secures an explicit open standards position in any agreement arising from the Joint Working Group.

    Back2Basics: India’s Decision to Sign the Artemis Accords

    1. India signed the Artemis Accords in June 2023, becoming among the later major spacefaring signatories.
    2. The Accords are a United States led set of non binding principles built on the Outer Space Treaty, 1967.
    3. Core commitments cover peaceful purposes, transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, registration of space objects, release of scientific data, protection of heritage, deconfliction through safety zones and orbital debris mitigation.
    4. Signing enabled the joint NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission and the training of Indian astronaut candidates in the United States.
    5. The Accords do not create binding treaty obligations and operate alongside, not in place of, the Outer Space Treaty.

    Constitutional and Treaty Framework Governing Outer Space

    1. Outer Space Treaty, 1967: Establishes outer space as the province of all mankind and bars national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.
    2. Rescue Agreement, 1968: Requires assistance to and return of astronauts and space objects.
    3. Liability Convention, 1972: Makes a launching state absolutely liable for damage caused by its space objects on the surface of the Earth.
    4. Registration Convention, 1975: Requires states to register objects launched into outer space with the United Nations.
    5. Moon Agreement, 1979: Declares the Moon and its resources the common heritage of mankind, and has not been ratified by any major spacefaring state.

    Way Forward

    1. Negotiate open standards explicitly: Make interoperability on open international standards a condition of participation rather than an assumption.
    2. Preserve sovereign control of hardware: Retain control over Indian built systems and their software in any joint architecture.
    3. Avoid exclusivity clauses: Decline terms conditioning participation on the exclusion of third country cooperation.
    4. Build deep space capacity: Expand the deep space network and advance the Next Generation Launch Vehicle to support independent lunar operations.
    5. Use multilateral forums: Press the lunar resource question at the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, where a universal rule can be built rather than a bloc rule.

    “[2023, GS3, 15 marks] What is the main task of India’s third moon mission which could not be achieved in its earlier mission? List the countries that have achieved this task. Introduce the subsystems in the spacecraft launched and explain the role of the Virtual Launch Control Centre at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre which contributed to the successful launch from Srihari Kota.”

  • Despite reputation, India’s per-unit space launch cost highest

    Why in the News

    A peer-reviewed study estimates India’s 2025 launch cost to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) at $13,302/kg, the highest among major spacefaring nations and far above the global average of $3,868/kg.

    The key distinction is between low mission cost and low cost per kilogram. India is efficient in spacecraft and mission design, but low launch frequency and limited payload capacity raise its per-kg cost.

    Cost per kg to LEO

    1. Meaning: Launch cost divided by payload mass delivered to LEO.
    2. Why important: A low-cost mission can still have a high per-kg cost if it carries a small payload.
    3. What it measures: Launch vehicle efficiency and utilisation, rather than spacecraft-design frugality.

    Experience Curve

    • An experience curve shows declining unit costs as cumulative production or launch volume increases.
    • Since 2010, the study finds a significant experience curve mainly for the US and Europe.
    • Higher launch frequency allows fixed costs to be distributed across more missions.

    Comparative Cost

    • India: $13,302/kg, Europe: $9,897/kg, Russia: $6,682/kg, China: $5,809/kg, Japan: $5,287/kg, USA: $3,225/kg, and Global average: $3,868/kg

    Why is India’s Cost High?

    1. Small vehicle bias: Smaller rockets carry limited payloads, increasing per-kg costs.
    2. Low launch cadence: India recorded only five launches in 2025.
    3. Heavy-lift gap: The 4,700 kg GSAT-N2 was launched by Falcon 9 in 2024 as it was beyond India’s available launch capability.
    4. High fixed costs: Launch infrastructure, range and workforce costs remain even with fewer launches.
    5. Limited demand: Indian satellite operators sometimes depend on foreign rideshare missions.

    Private Space Ecosystem

    • Around 400 startups have registered with IN-SPACe since 2020.
    • Skyroot Aerospace achieved India’s first privately developed orbital launch milestone.
    • Pixxel and Digantara have developed private satellite capabilities.
    • GalaxEye has booked Falcon 9 launch capacity.
    • The emerging pattern is domestic spacecraft development but foreign launch dependence.

    “[2026] Consider the following statements about involvement of private entities in India’s space programme:

    1. IN-SPACe is an autonomous agency formed to facilitate participation of private entities.

    2. Agnikul Cosmos launched the world’s first flight using 3D-printed rocket engine.

    3. Skyroot Aerospace has developed liquid fuel for GSLV.

    (a) 1 only

    (b) 2 and 3 only

    (c) 1 and 2 only

    (d) 1, 2 and 3

  • Odisha start-up flight-tests an autonomous in-space pharmaceutical manufacturing payload

    Why in the News

    A Bhubaneswar-based start-up, Serendipity Space, has flight-tested a prototype satellite carrying Alchemy, an autonomous pharmaceutical manufacturing payload, using a high-altitude balloon at the TIFR facility in Hyderabad. The technology aims to manufacture pharmaceutical products in microgravity without human supervision.

    How does it work?

    1. Microgravity: Near-weightlessness reduces sedimentation, buoyancy and convection.
    2. Crystal growth: Crystals can form differently and potentially with greater uniformity than on Earth.
    3. Autonomous processing: The satellite carries reagents and hardware and executes the manufacturing sequence independently.
    4. Recovery: Processed material is returned to Earth using a re-entry system and heatshield.

    What is LEO?

    • Low Earth Orbit (LEO) extends roughly up to 2,000 km above Earth.
    • The proposed system is intended for an altitude of about 400 to 500 km.

    What did the balloon test demonstrate?

    • Tested the satellite prototype under near-space conditions.
    • Validated avionics, heatshield and Alchemy payload.
    • Demonstrated autonomous operation.
    • Tested controlled return to Earth.
    • Serves as a relatively low-cost step before orbital deployment.

    How is it different from earlier space-based drug research?

    • Earlier experiments on platforms such as the ISS generally required crew involvement. The distinguishing feature here is a dedicated free-flying satellite designed for autonomous pharmaceutical manufacturing.
    • International examples include Varda Space Industries, Redwire and experiments aboard China’s Tiangong station.

    Why is it important for India?

    • Promotes private-sector space innovation.
    • Expands India’s space ecosystem beyond Bengaluru to cities such as Bhubaneswar, Pune and Ahmedabad.
    • Creates opportunities in pharma, biotechnology, space engineering and advanced manufacturing.
    • Demonstrates potential convergence of space technology + biotechnology + pharmaceuticals.

    Laws, Treaties and Rules Governing Space Activities

    1. Outer Space Treaty, 1967: Bars national appropriation of outer space and makes States internationally responsible for national activities, including those of private entities.
    2. Liability Convention, 1972: Makes the launching State absolutely liable for damage caused on the surface of the Earth or to aircraft in flight.
    3. Registration Convention, 1975: Requires launching States to maintain a registry of objects launched into outer space and to furnish details to the United Nations.
    4. Rescue Agreement, 1968: Obliges States to assist astronauts in distress and to return space objects to the launching State.
    5. Indian Space Policy, 2023: Defines the roles of ISRO, IN-SPACe and NSIL and permits private entities across the full value chain from launch to satellite operations.
    6. Space Activities Bill, 2017: Proposed a licensing and liability framework for private Indian space activity but lapsed without enactment.
    7. Norms, Guidelines and Procedures issued by IN-SPACe: Prescribe the authorisation route, safety requirements and liability sharing for non governmental entities operating from India.
    8. Telecommunications Act, 2023 and allied spectrum rules: Govern satellite spectrum assignment and the licensing of satellite based communication services.

    Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre

    1. What it is: IN-SPACe is the single window autonomous agency that authorises, promotes and supervises space activities by non governmental entities in India.
    2. Year established: Announced in 2020 as part of the space sector reforms and made operational in 2022.
    3. Parent department: It functions as an autonomous body under the Department of Space.
    4. Headquarters: Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
    5. Jurisdiction: It authorises private launches, satellite establishment and operation, ground station creation and the dissemination of space based data.
    6. Enabling role: It permits private entities to use ISRO facilities and to access ISRO technologies through transfer agreements.
    7. Distinction from NSIL: IN-SPACe regulates and promotes, while NewSpace India Limited is the commercial arm that contracts launches and technology transfers.

    “[2026] Consider the following statements about involvement of private entities in India’s space programme:
    1. IN-SPACe is an autonomous agency formed to facilitate participation of private entities.
    2. Agnikul Cosmos launched the world’s first flight using 3D-printed rocket engine.
    3. Skyroot Aerospace has developed liquid fuel for GSLV.
    (a) 1 only
    (b) 2 and 3 only
    (c) 1 and 2 only
    (d) 1, 2 and 3

  • NASA invites ISRO to join the Moon Base programme

    Why in the news?

    The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has asked the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to join its Moon Base programme, a project to establish a permanent research station on the Moon. The offer exposes a tension between the chance to accelerate ISRO’s own crewed-mission goals and the risk of locking India into another agency’s technology ecosystem. Space cooperation has continued to progress even amid the volatility of India-US relations.

    What is the Moon Base programme?

    1. About: An ambitious project to establish a permanent research station on the Moon where astronauts can live, work, and carry out experiments for extended periods.
    2. Sequence: It is the logical follow-up to landing humans on the Moon, aimed at preparing the ground for longer stays.

    What is the Artemis programme?

    1. About: A US-led programme that aims to land humans on the Moon before 2028, the first crewed return since 1972.
    2. Purpose: It is spearheaded by the United States and is designed to move faster and more efficiently by bringing in partner countries and private companies.

    What are the Artemis Accords?

    1. About: A US-led coalition of spacefaring countries setting principles for cooperative and sustainable lunar exploration, which India has already signed.
    2. Contested feature: The Accords sidestep and seek to replace the 1979 Moon Agreement, a framework for multilateral governance of lunar resources.

    What is the 1979 Moon Agreement?

    1. About: An international agreement that seeks to develop a multilateral governance framework for the use of lunar resources.
    2. Relevance: The Artemis Accords are seen as an alternative that the Moon Agreement’s supporters view as bypassing multilateral governance.

    What does India gain from joining?

    1. Crewed-mission experience: ISRO, which plans to land humans on the Moon by 2040, would gain hands-on experience in executing complex crewed missions.
    2. Technology access: Participation offers access to technologies relevant to sustained lunar operations.
    3. Existing commitments: India has signed the Artemis Accords and agreed with the US to develop a strategic framework for human spaceflight cooperation.
    4. Strategic stakes: Over coming decades the Moon could become strategically and economically important as countries begin to extract lunar resources.

    What are the risks of joining? (the central tension)

    1. US-led alliance perception: The Artemis Accords are increasingly seen as a US-led alliance, and two major space powers, China and Russia, are not part of it.
    2. Technology lock-in: It is important that ISRO does not get locked into NASA’s technology ecosystem, which would make it vulnerable to technology denial.
    3. Goal displacement: Cooperation should help ISRO achieve its own goals faster, not lead it to abandon or delay them in the service of someone else’s goals.
    4. Wariness of structures: India has been wary of joining such international structures, and signing the Accords already represented a choice.

    Government Initiatives in the Space Sector

    1. Gaganyaan: India’s human spaceflight programme to send astronauts to low-Earth orbit.
    2. Bharatiya Antariksh Station: India’s planned space station for sustained microgravity research.
    3. IN-SPACe: The body enabling private participation in the space sector.

    Challenges for India’s Lunar Cooperation

    1. Technology denial: Dependence on foreign systems risks future denial.
    2. Alliance optics: Alignment with a US-led coalition affects ties with other space powers.
    3. Governance gap: Competing frameworks leave lunar resource rules unsettled.
    4. Cost and capability: Crewed deep-space missions demand large, sustained investment.
    5. Autonomy risk: Partner timelines may divert ISRO from its own priorities.

    “[2025] Consider the following space missions:

    I. Axiom-4

    II. SpaDeX

    III. Gaganyaan

    How many of the space missions given above encourage and support microgravity research?

    (a) Only one

    (b) Only two

    (c) All the three

    (d) None