ISRO Chairman EXCLUSIVE! When NASA wanted to keep an equipment designed and developed by ISRO

ISRO's cost-effective success secrets: Chairman S Somanath reveals the agency's in-house approach and innovation during an exclusive interview with Asianet News Network. He also shares anecdotes, including one about NASA showing interest in their equipment

Building everything in-house... That's the tried and tested strategy that has allowed the Indian Space Research Organisation to deliver successful missions and satellite launches at a cost that is much lower when compared to its peers across the world, the space agency's chairman, S Somanath told Asianet News Network during a special episode of 'Dialogues'.

"The principle of keeping the cost low is coming out of the approaches we are taking. The first thing is models. To get into a model of something, you have to invest in prototyping, which happens on multiple levels. Then, most of our designs are not outsourced. They are done inside by our people. In fact, we created a method by which no design is outsourced, not even the ground design," Somanath said during the interview, in which Asianet News Network was given exclusive access inside ISRO's U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru.

The ISRO chairman cited a curious incident when the United States space agency NASA evinced keen interest in retaining one of the equipment designed and developed in-house by their Indian counterparts. 

"(Pointing towards a piece of equipment) Even this fixture, everything is designed in-house. It looks so simple. When we recently sent one of these to the US -- we were assembling a satellite called NISAR or the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar -- they liked this payload structure so much. They said, 'You retain it here and do not take it away; we want to have one like that," the ISRO chairman shared.

Watch The Full Interview Below: