IEEE SPACE Conference Showed How Outer Space Industry Can Prosper

Tom Coughlin at the 2026 SPACE Conference in Bangalore

Tom Coughlin

I attended the IEEE Space, Aerospace and defenCE (SPACE) conference in Bangalore India the last few days. While I was one of the 3 IEEE P’s (President and Past President) in 2024 and 2025 I attended and spoke at the first two of these conferences. The 2026 conference is the third event. I attended as one of the chairs of the IEEE SpaceTech initiative, which seeks to create relationships inside and outside of the IEEE in order to develop the technologies and relationships needed for the humanization of space.

The IEEE SPACE conference has been growing each year, with most attendees from India, but with many participants from other countries as well. The conference was fully supported as an IEEE Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society, AESS, event. Next year the SpaceTech conference will be held in Singapore in early July. The intent of holding the event in Singapore is to create more of an international event, pulling in organizations working on the development of outer space from throughout Asia and other countries as well. Our IEEE SpaceTech initiative is planning on participating in the 2027 event.

While I was in Bangalore for the conference a private Indian company, called Skyroot successfully launched its Vikram I rocket and delivered a satellite into low earth orbit, see the image of the launch below. Several talks at the conference mentioned this launch, which the Indian space participants were very proud of.

The successful Skyroot launch shows that the number of private launch services is increasing worldwide. Because of regular private launch services, such as SpaceX, the price of delivering payloads to outer space, particularly low earth orbit, has fallen and with larger reuseable vehicles these costs are projected to drop even further, from $1,400-$1,500/kg for a dedicated flight on a Falcon Heavy to less than $200/kg projected for the SpaceX Starship. With the growth of competitive launch services, these costs will drop even further.

Lower launch costs will lead to doing more in space, likely with physical AI (autonomous and semi-autonomous robots), such as manufacturing of various products including those to further build out space infrastructure, mining the moon and asteroids and launching and maintaining space-based data centers that will enable management of this automated space infrastructure. Space exploration and space scientific work will also benefit, with for instance, more science projects and various types of astronomy, including large scale gravity wave telescopes.

Human spaceflight will also benefit from lower launch costs, but the biggest gains, I believe will come from creating industry in space and thus ensuring a long-term human presence in space.

It is for these reasons that the IEEE SpaceTech initiative was started this year. IEEE has members and activities representing almost every technology used in space development and who are from countries all over the world. IEEE can help with international consensus standards for space communications, traffic control and debris management in space, and on the use of AI and physical AI (robotics) in space, to establish best practices and to enable an active and competitive marketplace.

IEEE can also help with convening and bringing together experts from all over the world to come together and talk about how to apply technology to enable the development of the space and inform international public policies around the world.

IEEE is creating a SpaceTech committee to bring together experts, companies and governments to enable the humanization of outer space. The 2026 IEEE SPACE conference in India demonstrated how this can be done.