India’s Private Space Industry Poised for Takeoff with Skyroot Leading
▼ Summary
– In 2020, India opened its spaceflight sector to private industry, allowing companies to build rockets, launch them, and use state facilities.
– The policy shift was driven by the rise of commercial space industries in the US and China, which were gaining global influence.
– Six years later, Skyroot Aerospace, India’s most promising launch company, is nearing its first orbital rocket launch with the Vikram-1 vehicle.
– Skyroot’s cofounder Pawan Kumar Chandana left ISRO in 2018, inspired by SpaceX and Rocket Lab, to start the company before India’s space sector was fully opened.
– With a recent $60 million funding round valuing the firm at $1.1 billion, Skyroot is poised to accelerate its commercial launch efforts.
After decades of maintaining a tight grip over every facet of spaceflight, the Indian government made a pivotal decision in 2020 to open its space sector to private industry. The new policy essentially allowed companies to build their own rockets, secure launch permits, and even utilize state-run facilities. This shift was a direct response to the emergence of thriving commercial space industries in the United States and later China, which were increasingly shaping the global spaceflight landscape.
Now, six years on, that structural transformation is starting to deliver tangible results. The most promising Indian launch startup, Skyroot Aerospace, is approaching the launchpad with its first orbital rocket. The Vikram-1 launch vehicle could lift off within the next two months, according to cofounder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana in an interview. With a recent $60 million fundraising round that values the company at $1.1 billion, Skyroot is well positioned to ramp up its commercial launch operations.
Chandana earned an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in 2012 and, like virtually any space enthusiast in India at the time, joined the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). But by 2018, he sensed the coming disruption in the space industry and believed India would soon follow the global trend. “Going back to my school days, I always had the ambition to be an entrepreneur,” he said. “I was super inspired by what SpaceX was doing. Rocket Lab was also building up. The world definitely needed more access to space.”
Although India lacked a purely commercial space industry at the time, Chandana saw the country had the right ingredients: talented engineers, a strong supplier base, government-operated spaceports, and a strategic location near the equator. Still, leaving ISRO was a major gamble. There were no guarantees that India would liberalize its launch industry or allow government payloads to fly on private rockets. But Chandana believed that if he did not start building a private launch company then, competitors in the United States, China, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere would pull even further ahead. So, in June 2018, he and fellow ISRO scientist Naga Bharath Daka took the leap and founded Skyroot in Hyderabad.
(Source: Ars Technica)
