India marked its second National Space Day on 23 August with Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledging to turn the country into a launch hub capable of firing 50 rockets a year and nurturing five space-technology unicorns within the next five years. Modi urged private companies to accelerate investment, saying the domestic industry currently averages only five to six launches annually. ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan sketched an equally ambitious roadmap, confirming work on a Chandrayaan-4 lunar sample-return, a Venus Orbiter mission and the Bharatiya Antriksh Station, which the agency intends to assemble in orbit by 2035. The projects are meant to build on the high-profile Chandrayaan-3 south-pole landing achieved in August 2023. The expansive targets come despite a difficult year for the Indian Space Research Organisation. Two of the three launches conducted from Indian soil in 2025 have failed. The NVS-02 navigation satellite, launched on 29 January, remains in an incorrect orbit because of a suspected propulsion valve fault, and the PSLV-C61 mission carrying the EOS-09 radar-imaging satellite was lost on 18 May after a third-stage pressure drop eight minutes into flight, ISRO has said. Funding constraints add to the challenge. The Union Budget earmarks ₹6,103 crore ($733 million) for space capital expenditure in fiscal 2025-26, still below pre-pandemic levels, and government data show only 22 percent of allocated funds for follow-on Gaganyaan human-spaceflight work have been released so far. Parliamentarians and sector analysts have called for greater transparency, noting that ISRO has yet to publish formal failure-analysis reports for the NVS-02 and PSLV-C61 missions. Until those reviews are completed, critics say, the agency’s path toward the high-frequency launch cadence envisioned by the government remains uncertain.