India, having earned 3 billion Rupees last year from its space programs, expects to win 10 per cent of the global satellite market over the next five years, reports The Peninsula, an online Qatari news site.

ISRO chief, G Madhavan Nair, told newsmen in Thiruvananthapuram Monday that he expected to maintain a revenue growth of 25 per cent because “our greatest advantage is the cost-competitiveness of our space program”.

“The satellite that we just put in orbit, we had spent only Rs3.8bn whereas a similar one in the US will fetch Rs15bn,” he said.

“But the Russian and European market is flooded with launchers, mostly with the missile-converted launchers. So it’s a really tough job and we have to rely on our cost advantage,” Nair said.

Nair was addressing the press here, along with the team leaders of the recent Cartosat-1 launch mission.

Displaying images of the famed Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, and the railway coaches lined up at the Amritsar railway station, taken by Cartosat-1 from space, Nair said the image resolution rate was as good as 1 metre.

He said countries like Brazil, Chile, South Africa, and Germany had asked for India’s satellite data and images. “Even the US used our own Indian Remote Sensing images when one of their satellites ran a glitch,” he said, according to The Peninsula.

India is planning to launch a series of satellites before the 2007-8 Chandrayan-1 lunar mission is launched.

“Our own Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), which has proved highly successful during the last eight launches, will be putting the European satellite, ‘Agile’ into orbit early next year, which will be an indigenous, full-fledged commercial launch,” the ISRO chief said.

Besides PSLV, ISRO has developed another launch rocket for placing satellites in orbit, the Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle.

PSLV can put more than a tonne into low polar orbit, while GSLV can put almost 2.5 tonnes into geosynchronous orbit.

According to the Peninsula, Nair said India would be devoting the whole of next year to mapping work. Referring to questions on snooping on other countries, Nair said the country already had enough data on its neighbours through other sources.