In 2017, a 64-gram satellite built by an 18-year-old in rural Tamil Nadu for $1,500 was chosen by NASA from among 86,000 global entries and launched from Wallops Island — not because the world's most advanced space agency lowered its standards, but because a teenager named Rifath Sharook met them. Named KalamSat in honor of India's beloved rocket-engineer-turned-president, the tiny craft carried a quiet but consequential argument: that the door to space had never been as locked as most people assumed. Two years later, a successor satellite reached orbit aboard an ISRO rocket, moving the experi