India, Aug. 27 -- The Race To Make Drugs In Space

For decades, microgravity research was largely about discovering how matter behaved beyond Earth. Now, Indian startups are exploring whether medicines and advanced materials can be made up in the sky. So, can space manufacturing become India's next deeptech frontier?

Manufacturing In Space: Microgravity in low-Earth orbit removes much of the convection, sedimentation and buoyancy that shape experiments on Earth. This allows researchers to grow more uniform protein crystals, study biological processes and develop materials with properties that are difficult to reproduce on the ground.

As such, focus is now shifting from what scientists can observe in orbit to what companies can manufactu...