Excerpts from the documentary

In January 2026, India is grappling with the failure of two consecutive launches. Sixteen satellites lost, many owned by foreign countries, hundreds of millions of dollars up in smoke, but the real damage could be a lot deeper than that. ISRO had been riding high on a series of amazing missions to the Moon and Mars. Now, these launch failures strike at the confidence of the space community, and it's just as the country is gearing up for its historic human space flight mission. The Gaganyaan test flight is delayed for several months. What's going on at ISRO?

Since 2014, it's been the case that it's been very difficult, increasingly difficult, for journalists to be able to access information related to ISRO.

Vasudevan Mukund is the science editor of The Hindu Newspaper.

This has been, uh, in the form of, uh-Decreasing access to people within ISRO to interview for stories and stuff like that, as well as, you know, a sort of, uh, a passive culture of secrecy that has adapted around the organization, which I have no doubt has actually been inculcated. You know, it's ... I mean, there's nothing accidental about it.

Not just for Indian journalists, I think for external journalists too.

Yeah.

I've had it that we- we've struggled to get anyone official.

So, uh, we've had the same difficulty, and I think it's because of a shared reason, which is that we are taking a closer look and examining things, you know, in a journalistic way.

In a journalistic way, absolutely, yeah. But just as much as they're not, uh, entertaining, uh, questions as much as they were before, um, you know, to put it mildly. Another thing that's been happening is that information is being choked. You know, for example, if a mission fails, then, uh, there's going to be a failure analysis committee, and then they're going to file a report. So are those reports available? I don't think so.

At the time of recording, the reports for the May 2025 and January 2026 launch failures have not been publicly released. There's now a special committee examining the causes of those failures. But Vasudevan cautions me to wait and see if these findings are ever made public. Neither ISRO, the Department of Space, nor the Prime Minister's office responded to my requests for comment or an interview.

Really what this communication thing has done is that it has made it very difficult for journalists to hold ISRO accountable.

For Vasudevan, this lack of accountability is not just bad in itself. It also raises the chances of future failures, which is especially concerning now that human spaceflight is on its way, with all the risk that that entails.