New Delhi: India’s space start-up base has grown from a single start-up in 2022 to more than 400 in 2026, with the industry now targeting an 8 percent share of the country’s GDP by 2033, up from 2 percent at present, figures presented at a satellite communications conference in the Capital showed Tuesday.
The satellite communications segment alone is projected to grow to $25 billion by 2028, according to the Broadband India Forum (BIF), which hosted the 10th edition of its India SatCom conference on the theme of satellite communications as an enabler of digital inclusion.
The conference saw the release of two white papers. One was on Direct-to-Device (D2D) integration, which examines how satellites can connect directly to phones and devices.
The second, on cybersecurity in satellite networks, warned that as satellite systems tie in more closely with terrestrial telecom, cloud platforms, domestic gateways and 3GPP non-terrestrial networks, the points at which they can be attacked multiply.
The cybersecurity paper, ‘Trusted from Space to Ground’, argued that the weakest points in these networks lie not in orbit but on the ground, in gateways, cloud consoles and terminals that are far easier to reach than a spacecraft. A stolen cloud token can alter terminal provisioning; a compromised gateway account can reroute traffic or suppress monitoring.
To make the point, the paper leaned on the February 2022 KA-SAT attack, in which the attackers never touched the satellite. They entered through a misconfigured VPN appliance, moved into a trusted management segment and issued legitimate-looking commands that overwrote data in thousands of modems, knocking out service for several thousand users in Ukraine and tens of thousands more across Europe.
Other episodes cited were more recent. In July 2026, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency disclosed flaws in iDirect terminals that could leak authentication identifiers and force repeated reboots.
The agency reported no known exploitation and pointed to fixed firmware. A 2025 study found that researchers passively scanning 411 transponders across 39 geostationary satellites picked up sensitive traffic, including mobile backhaul and credentials, travelling unencrypted.
Abhay Karandikar, Member, NITI Aayog, opened the addresses by pointing to the pace of change in the sector. “Satellite communication is witnessing a remarkable phase of technological evolution,” he said, listing smaller and more capable satellites, large constellations, software-defined systems and onboard processing as forces turning satcom into “more dynamic and intelligent communications infrastructure”.
Manish Sinha, Member (Finance) of the Digital Communications Commission at the Department of Telecommunications, positioned satellite as the third layer of the country’s networks, alongside fixed and mobile.
“Satcom is an indispensable complement to terrestrial and mobile networks, particularly in reaching areas where conventional infrastructure may be difficult to deploy and in addressing the last-mile connectivity challenge,” he said. “The technology has matured, the ecosystem is ready, and the opportunity is immense.”
Delivering a special address on India-UK cooperation, Sophia Nestius-Booth, Director of Science and Technology at the British High Commission in India, said the partnership in telecoms and satellite technology continued to grow “in both ambition and opportunity”, with work channelled through the UK-India Centre for Innovation and Connectivity under the Technology Security Initiative.
BIF Chairperson Aruna Sundararajan tied the two papers to the satcom start-up sector’s changing shape.
The cybersecurity paper, she said, “addresses an equally critical requirement as satellite networks become more deeply integrated with national digital infrastructure”. Together, she added, the papers sought to support “an informed policy discourse around innovation, security, interoperability and the development of a future-ready satcom ecosystem”.
The paper also looked ahead to two pressure sources the satcom start-up sector is only beginning to reckon with. One is artificial intelligence, cast as a double-edged tool, able to help analysts sift telemetry and network logs faster, but equally able to help attackers map weaknesses and automate reconnaissance.
The other is quantum computing. Because satellites, signing keys and stored data can stay in use for years, the paper flagged a “harvest-now, decrypt-later” risk, in which encrypted traffic collected today is stored for decryption once quantum machines mature.
It noted a February 2026 Indian task force proposal for critical infrastructure to migrate to quantum-safe systems by 2029.
The conference was attended by senior representatives from the Wireless Planning and Coordination Wing, the Department of Telecommunications and the Indian Space Research Organisation, alongside industry participants.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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Call me a greedy nationalist but I also want to see a boom in manufacturing basic things. Like why is my screw coming from China ? Building the small components which are also used in building rockets is very important. We should really focus on these small but critical components.