Beyond prompting questions about commitment to transparency and concerns over institutional complacency, the second successive failure of India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) mission has the potential to create doubts about the otherwise celebrated space program’s reliability.

The mission designated PSLV-C62, carrying a payload of as many as 16 satellites, failed in the third stage of its four-stage flight on January 12. The fact that this failure occurred during the third stage of the flight, which also brought down PSLV-C61 in May 2025, has been causing concerns among experts whether the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is confronting some deeper technical challenges in its signature PSLV program. Some of those concerns arise out of the question whether ISRO engineers were unable to draw lessons from the first failure.

ISRO Has Launched 400 Satellites

The PSLV program launched in 1993 has had a stellar record generally and has been at the heart of India’s global reputation as a space power when it comes to satellite launches at incomparably affordable prices to those seeking to launch commercial satellites. The PSLV  rocket has over the last 33 years achieved 58 successful missions. Since 2014, ISRO has launched some 400 satellites and remains a much sought-after provider of satellite launches across the world. Some 34 foreign entities have ridden India’s remarkable space launches so far.

Over the decades, the mechanics and overall performance parameters of the PSLV rocket technology have fully matured and ought to be well-known to ISRO engineers. It is the rapid succession of the two failures in the same third stage of the flight that is generating questions. It can be a serious challenge for ISRO.

Producing satellites for any purpose is an expensive endeavor. Failure to launch them has a profound impact not just on the client entities’ bottom lines but even the quality of science and services they may be seeking to pursue. Fifteen out of the sixteen satellites on the failed mission were from foreign entities, which constitute a lucrative market for ISRO. If they begin to nurse misgivings about ISRO’s reliability it can seriously dent not only the agency’s revenue but, more important, its reputation.

Attached to this problem is also the question of insurance premiums since insurance companies assessing risks for ISRO could have questions after the two failures. Subsequently, premiums could rise.

Failure Report Not Made Public 

Reports out of a section of the Indian media suggest that ISRO’s Failure Analysis Committee (FAC) had submitted its report about the May 2025 PSLV failure to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in August last year. That report has not been made public yet for reasons which are not clear. Being a civilian space program, it is incumbent on the Indian government to make at the very least salient findings public.

After the second PSLV failure, V. Narayan, the ISRO chairman, had said, “The performance of the vehicle, up to the end of, close to the end of the third stage was as expected. Close to the end of the third stage, we were seeing a little more disturbance in the vehicle roll rates. And subsequently, there was a deviation observed in the flight path.”

All space entities around the world have inherent reluctance to publicly explain failures with great candor for various reasons. ISRO may not be unique in that sense but in its zeal to guard its reputation as the world’s most affordable launcher of satellites the agency or its political overseers may choose to bar some holds when it comes to such failures.

When ISRO’s Vikram lunar lander mission failed on the Moon in September 2019, it had displayed similar coyness to acknowledge that it had indeed crashed. Soon after the Vikram crash, experts in the U.S. had suggested that contrary to ISRO’s contention that Vikram had a hard landing, it had, in fact, crashed.

Dr. Bharat Thakkar, a widely respected Chicago-based expert on reliability of systems and quality control for over five decades, was the first to calculate based on mathematics and principles such as coefficient of restitution or COR (elasticity of a collision) to conclude that Vikram had crashed and not hard-landed. It was only several months later that ISRO obliquely acknowledged that.

(The writer is a Chicago-based journalist, author and commentator. Views are personal. He can be reached at mcsix@outlook.com)