India creates space strategy to capture market beyond SpaceX

India has a plan to carve out a beachhead in the battle for commercial space, officials say: crunching space data, building small satellites and launching them cheaply into orbit rather than challenging heavyweights such as SpaceX head-on.

In particular, it is taking aim at providing cost-effective services and hardware to sectors such as communications, agriculture and commodities, where high-quality data is a precious resource.

At stake is a launch market worth $14.54 billion by 2031, and a related data services market pegged at $45 billion by 2030.