Arif Reshad
University of Essex
When Bangladesh launched the Bangabandhu-1 satellite aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in May 2018, it joined a relatively small club of nations that own and operate geostationary communications satellites. It was a landmark moment, and it was celebrated as such. But a single commercial communications satellite, managed by the Bangladesh Communication Satellite Company Limited and primarily serving television broadcasting and telecommunications backhaul markets, does not constitute a space research programme.
Seven years on, the gap between the symbolism of Bangabandhu-1 and the substantive development of a national space capability remains wide, and the policy decisions made in the next five years will determine whether that gap narrows or widens irreversibly.
Bangladesh’s institutional foundation for space research predates its satellite ownership by four decades. The Bangladesh Space Research and Remote Sensing Organisation, known as SPARRSO, was established in 1980 and has operated since as the country’s primary scientific body engaged with space-based technologies.
SPARRSO’s work is largely applied rather than exploratory. It uses remote sensing data from foreign satellites for agricultural monitoring, flood mapping, coastline change detection, and disaster response support. This is valuable and practically consequential work, particularly for a delta nation that loses productive land to erosion and faces annual flood cycles of growing severity. However, SPARRSO operates with budgetary constraints, aging technical infrastructure, and research output that has not kept pace with the rapid expansion of space technology globally.
The more ambitious vision has emerged in policy documents and government statements over the past several years. Bangladesh has announced plans for a Bangabandhu-2 satellite, feasibility studies for small rocket development, a proposed Space Industrial Park to house research and manufacturing facilities, and aspirations to develop indigenous satellite design capacity.
These announcements signal genuine political appetite for space sector development. The challenge, consistent with Bangladesh’s experience in technology park development more broadly, is converting announced ambition into functional infrastructure and human capital.
The case for Bangladesh investing seriously in space research is not primarily about national prestige. It is about practical economic and environmental returns that are uniquely accessible through space-based capability. Bangladesh is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, with approximately thirty million people living in low-elevation coastal zones exposed to sea-level rise, cyclonic storm surge, and salinity intrusion. Indigenous earth observation satellite capacity, even at the small satellite scale, would give Bangladesh the ability to monitor its own territory in real time, independent of foreign data providers whose priorities and revisit frequencies do not always align with Bangladesh’s specific needs.
For agriculture, which still employs nearly forty percent of the national workforce, satellite-based crop monitoring, soil moisture analysis, and yield forecasting can dramatically improve planning accuracy at both the farm and national policy levels. For urban development, high-resolution earth observation supports land use planning, infrastructure assessment, and environmental compliance monitoring in a country urbanising at one of the fastest rates in Asia. Space research, in other words, is not a luxury discipline for wealthy nations. For Bangladesh, it is applied national development infrastructure.
Bangladesh needs a comprehensive National Space Policy that defines objectives, assigns institutional responsibilities, establishes funding commitments, and creates a legal framework for both public and private sector participation in space activities. Several countries at comparable development stages (including Ethiopia and Venezuela) have enacted such legislation. Bangladesh has not, and the absence of a statutory framework leaves SPARRSO and BCSCL operating without a coherent national mandate that connects their activities to broader development goals.
The country must invest in space science and human capital at the university level. No meaningful indigenous space research programme can be built without a pipeline of engineers and scientists trained in aerospace systems, satellite technology, remote sensing data analysis, and orbital mechanics. Currently, no Bangladeshi university offers a dedicated aerospace engineering programme. Establishing at least one centre of excellence, ideally in partnership with an established international space agency such as JAXA, ESA, or ISRO, would begin building the generational talent base that any serious space programme requires.
Bangladesh should also prioritise small satellite development over the prestige-driven pursuit of large geostationary platforms. Nanosatellites and CubeSats, which can be designed and built by university research teams for a fraction of the cost of commercial communications satellites, offer Bangladesh a realistic entry point into indigenous satellite development. Several universities in India, South Korea, and Turkey began precisely this way, and the learning embedded in the process (systems integration, orbital dynamics, ground station operations) is irreplaceable as a foundation for more sophisticated future capabilities.
Bangladesh is looking upward. The question is whether the institutional infrastructure, the budget commitments, and the human capital investments exist to meet the ambition halfway. The window for building a credible space research foundation is open. It will not remain so indefinitely.
