Space

Space, in the sense tested by civil-services examinations, denotes the region beyond the Kármán line — conventionally fixed at 100 km altitude by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale — and the legal-strategic domain it constitutes. Its foundational law is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 (Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space). Article I declares space the "province of all mankind"; Article II prohibits national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, use, or occupation; Article IV bans nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit and restricts the Moon and celestial bodies to peaceful purposes. Four further instruments complete the corpus: the Rescue Agreement (1968), the Liability Convention (1972), the Registration Convention (1975), and the largely unratified Moon Agreement (1979). These are administered through the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), established by the General Assembly in 1959.

Operationally, space activity spans launch, orbital insertion, satellite operation, deep-space exploration, and the emerging domains of in-orbit servicing and resource utilisation. Orbits are classified by altitude — Low Earth Orbit (LEO, up to ~2,000 km), Medium Earth Orbit (where the GPS and NavIC constellations sit), and Geostationary Orbit (GEO, ~35,786 km), a finite resource coordinated by the International Telecommunication Union through orbital-slot and frequency allocation. India's programme is anchored by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), created in 1969, operating the PSLV and GSLV/LVM3 launchers, the Chandrayaan lunar series, the Mangalyaan Mars Orbiter Mission (2014), and the Aditya-L1 solar mission. The Indian Space Policy 2023 and the creation of IN-SPACe and NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) have opened the sector to private participation.

Named milestones recur in exam questions: Sputnik-1 (USSR, 1957) opened the Space Age; Yuri Gagarin's flight (1961); the Apollo 11 Moon landing (1969); Rakesh Sharma as the first Indian in space (1984); Chandrayaan-1's confirmation of lunar water (2008–09); Chandrayaan-3's south-pole soft landing (2023), making India the fourth nation to land on the Moon and the first near the lunar south pole. India also demonstrated an anti-satellite (ASAT) capability under Mission Shakti (2019). As of 2026 the Gaganyaan human-spaceflight programme is in its uncrewed-test and crewed phases, and India targets the Bharatiya Antariksha Station by 2035 and a crewed Moon landing by 2040. Strategic concerns include orbital debris, the Kessler syndrome, the militarisation versus weaponisation distinction, and the unresolved governance gap over asteroid mining left by the under-ratified Moon Agreement.

For the examination, space straddles UPSC GS Paper III (Science & Technology, "developments in space") and current affairs, with FSOT, CSS and BCS testing the treaty framework and national programmes. Typical prelims questions probe orbit types, ISRO mission objectives, and treaty provisions; mains and interview angles ask candidates to evaluate the public-private shift after the 2023 policy, India's strategic posture on ASAT and debris, and the adequacy of the 1967 regime for commercial resource extraction. Precision on dates, the five UN instruments, and mission specifics distinguishes strong answers.