On January 12, 2026, Nine Nepali high school students watched their dreams dissolve into the Indian Ocean. The MUNAL satellite-a 1U CubeSat they had spent two years designing, assembling, and testing with their own hands-had reached space aboard an Indian PSLV rocket. But it never reached orbit. A third-stage anomaly left the payloads, including MUNAL, stuck inside their dispenser, tumbling uselessly before plunging into the sea.
The official statements from the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) were gracious, grateful, and diplomatically optimistic. "Not a complete success," they called it. But in plain language, it was a failure-the first time since 1999 that ISRO had lost a foreign commercial payload, and a devastating blow to a project that represented Nepal's best hope for indigenous space capability.
Just weeks earlier, another Nepali satellite-the Slippers2Sat (S2S)-had made history of a different kind. Built by middle school students from the Chepang community, one of Nepal's most marginalized indigenous groups, this 1U CubeSat was launched from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in December 2025 .
The mission's theme was deliberately evocative: "Slipper to Satellite," capturing the journey of a community where many can barely afford a pair of slippers, yet whose children had now built something that would orbit the Earth .
But upon deployment, no signal was received. The ground station at NAST-the very facility meant to receive S2S's transmissions-failed to establish contact.
Nepal has become extraordinarily good at launching symbols of aspiration into the void. What it refuses to build is the infrastructure-the policy framework, the sustained funding, the operational competence-to catch them when they come home.
The Slippers2Sat story deserves to be told not as a footnote, but as the central indictment of Nepal's science and technology failures. This was not a project born in Kathmandu's elite schools or university laboratories. It was conceived in the Chepang settlements of Chitwan, Makwanpur, and Dhading-communities where 90 percent still live below the poverty line, with annual incomes often less than USD100.
The Slipper2Sat was successfully deployed. A Chinese Kinetica-1 rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center placed it exactly where it needed to be. But when the moment came to hear its signal-to receive the first transmissions from a satellite built by Chepang children-the ground station at NAST in Khumaltar was not ready. No signal was received.
This is not a new problem. In 2019, when Nepal launched its first satellite, NepaliSat-1, the same story unfolded. The satellite was in orbit, but Nepal's ground station was not operational. For four months, Nepal could not communicate with its own satellite. Data was received with the help of Bhutan. When NAST finally sought a license for the ground station, there was no space policy to guide them. The license was issued under The Radio Communication (License) Regulation, 1992-the same category used for FM radio stations and cordless phones. Officials admitted they faced difficulties because "there were no clear laws regarding space in the country."
Seven years later, nothing has changed. The Slippers2Sat, launched in late 2025, suffered the same fate. A satellite in orbit, a ground station not ready. A pattern, not an anomaly.
The cruelty of this failure is magnified by who built the satellite. These were not privileged students from Kathmandu's elite schools. These were Chepang children, whose presence in a space laboratory was itself a miracle of opportunity and effort. They had journeyed from "ideation in Chitwan to manufacturing in China, to assembly in Nepal, to testing in India, followed by further testing in China, and now, finally, to its launch" . And when their creation reached its destination, the government institution meant to welcome it home was silent.
The MUNAL project was equally extraordinary, if less improbable in its origins. Nine students from Kathmandu University High School, Chaitanya Secondary School, Azad Secondary School, and Sanjiwani Model Higher Secondary School spent two years in the Space Systems Laboratory at KUHS, mentored by APN engineers, learning to build a satellite equipped with dual RGB and Near-Infrared cameras and AI-driven image segmentation technology. This was indigenous development, youth-led innovation, proof that Nepali minds can master the complexities of space science when given the chance.
The satellite was ready. The ground station at NAST was, this time, supposedly operational. But on January 12, 2026, the PSLV-C62 rocket's third stage failed. Chamber pressure dropped. Thrust was lost. The satellites, including MUNAL, never reached their intended orbit .
ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan confirmed the failure. NAST officials, who had traveled to India to witness the launch, returned home with nothing but condolences and promises to begin work on MUNAL-2 .
The students' two years of work, their aspirations, their late nights in the lab-all of it ended in the Indian Ocean.
Both MUNAL and Slippers2Sat share a common DNA. They were built by students-high schoolers and middle schoolers-mentored by Antarikshya Pratisthan Nepal (APN) engineers, supported by international grants and foreign goodwill. The MUNAL project nearly died before it launched, not because of technical challenges, but because of a funding shortfall. The price of a modest house in Kathmandu. The project was rescued not by Nepali government foresight, but by Indian diplomatic goodwill: a grant assistance agreement signed in late 2024 provided the launch for free.
The Slippers2Sat relied entirely on ARDC, an international amateur radio foundation, for financial support . APN engineers worked for months in Chitwan, establishing a laboratory, training students, designing systems-all without the kind of sustained government funding that would be routine in any country serious about space.
We celebrate these projects as national achievements while the state contributes almost nothing to their survival. We put students on pedestals while leaving them to beg foreign partners for the rockets to reach them. And when those rockets fail, or when our own ground stations fail, we express gratitude and pledge to try again.
The students will keep building. They have proven that. The Chepang children, the high school teams, the APN engineers-they are not the problem. They are the solution, operating in an environment that offers them nothing but obstacles. They built satellites with AI capabilities in a country where university research labs gather dust. They trained marginalized students in orbital mechanics while the national education system struggles with basic infrastructure.
The 2019 NepaliSat-1 launch prompted Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli to declare that Nepal had "entered the space era." Scientists and stakeholders immediately pushed back, demanding a comprehensive National Space Policy rather than the narrow Satellite Policy the ministry had drafted. They argued for a separate space agency, clear jurisdictional authority, and a regulatory framework that would prevent precisely the kind of operational failures Nepal keeps experiencing.
By early 2026, none of this has materialized. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology still cannot agree on who owns space. The National Science, Technology and Innovation Policy exists on paper, but its implementation has been, by any honest assessment, negligible. The research institutes it was supposed to revitalize remain underfunded and understaffed.
The result is that every satellite project operates in a legal and institutional gray zone. Ground stations are licensed under obsolete radio regulations. International agreements are negotiated ad hoc, project by project. When failures happen-and they will happen, because space is hard-there is no institutional mechanism to absorb the lessons, fund the next iteration, or hold anyone accountable.
Underpinning all of this is a funding reality that no press release can obscure. Nepal invests approximately 0.3 percent of its GDP in research and development. This is not just low; it is among the lowest in the world. The United States invests nearly 3.5 percent. Even an increase to 1 percent-roughly $410 million annually-would transform the research ecosystem.
But 0.3 percent is not a rounding error; it is a policy choice. It is a statement that research, innovation, and the infrastructure of the future are not priorities. When even the education budget, at around 3.5 percent of GDP, is considered inadequate by many analysts, the marginalization of R&D becomes stark. The government funds the universities, but not the research they produce. It builds the buildings, but not the labs inside them. It celebrates the students, but not the systems that would keep their satellites alive.
There is also a troubling geopolitical pattern in Nepal's space strategy. MUNAL launched on an Indian rocket, for free, under a diplomatic agreement. Slippers2Sat launched on a Chinese rocket, with international funding. NepaliSat-1 was built in Japan, under a UN program.
There is nothing inherently wrong with international collaboration. But when every satellite depends on a different foreign patron, when there is no domestic launch capability, no redundancy, no Plan B, Nepal's space program becomes a hostage to the goodwill and technical success of others. When ISRO's PSLV failed, MUNAL failed with it. When the Chinese deployment succeeded, Nepal's ground station failed anyway. In neither case did Nepal have any control over its own destiny.
The Indian government spent approximately Rs 20 crore (about $2.4 million) on the PSLV-C62 mission that carried MUNAL . Nepal paid nothing for the launch. This generosity is real and should be acknowledged. But it is not a strategy. It is a gamble that Nepal's space ambitions will align forever with the launch schedules and diplomatic priorities of its neighbors. And as January 12, 2026 proved, gambles sometimes lose.
Perhaps the most painful aspect of the Slippers2Sat story is what it represents about national priorities. Here was a project designed explicitly to "uplift, encourage, and educate marginalized, impoverished, and aboriginal communities of Nepal" . Here were students from a community once characterized by the king as people living in forests, hunting wild animals, barely surviving . They had been given a chance, and they had seized it. They had built a satellite that would orbit the Earth, carrying missions "designed for that very community"-communication support, imaging, earthquake precursor detection .
The theme "Slipper to Satellite" was chosen deliberately: "the journey of people from a community who can barely afford to buy and wear a pair of slippers to the construction of a satellite" . It was meant to inspire, to demonstrate that no barrier is insurmountable, that talent exists everywhere if only opportunity is provided.
But when that satellite reached orbit, the government's infrastructure was not ready. The students succeeded. The state failed. The Chepang children's miracle was met with silence from the very institutions meant to receive it.
.The MUNAL satellite fell into the Indian Ocean. The Slippers2Sat orbits in silence. NepaliSat-1's ground station required Bhutan's help. Three satellites, three failures of different kinds, one common cause.
Nepal does not need another satellite project. It needs a space policy. It needs functioning ground stations. It needs an R&D budget that reflects the future, not the past. It needs the government to do its job so that when students-whether from Kathmandu's high schools or Chitwan's Chepang settlements-build miracles, those miracles have somewhere to land.
The Chepang students who built S2S have proven something profound. They have shown that marginalization is not a lack of capacity, but a lack of opportunity. They have shown that given training, resources, and belief, children from communities that have been neglected for generations can build spacecraft. They have shown that Nepal's future in space does not depend on elite institutions or foreign experts, but on the systematic unleashing of talent wherever it exists.
But they have also shown that talent alone is not enough. Without infrastructure, without policy, without sustained investment, every satellite becomes a message in a bottle-launched with hope, but unlikely to find a recipient.
The students will keep building. The Chepang children will keep learning. The APN engineers will keep sacrificing. They have proven they can do their part.
The question is whether the state will ever build the infrastructure-policy, funding, institutions-to catch what they launch. Until then, Nepal's space program will remain what it has always been: a series of brilliant, heartbreaking launches into the void, with no one waiting at the station to bring them home.
The Author is the Founding President of Nepal Forum of Science Journalists